Ok folks. So the Mod team has been discussing potentially updating the software used here at Da Warpath. Invisionfree was shiny and new in 2004 but it is really starting to show it's age and we'd like to move over to something a bit more modern where we have more options and more control.

Now this is a long term project and is still being discussed. Also I don't want to talk about specifics yet, it's way too early. So please don’t ask any 'will it do X, Y and Z' questions yet, we're not nearly close enough to answer them.

That said, if you have any suggestions, ideas, or things you simply would love to see here, let us know, however wacky they are. Someone mentioned twitter a while back. Perhaps you want larger avatars, a tactics WIKI or some kind of Forum Clans. I want to compile a list in one place so we can discuss them behind the curtain. The idea is that we won't be restricted by the very limited invisionfree and will have a much more modern piece of software, so many more things will be possible. We’d also like to get the mainsite integrated too so bear that in mind. If you have a look at sites like CDO and the Ogre Stronghold, you’ll see the possibilities that using newer software offers.

Finally, if you have any experience with software coding and don’t mind helping out at some point in the future (and have been around long enough for me to trust you wiv me choppa, no snottos pleeze!) feel free to drop me a PM too.

Just to add a little more here:

Once we get things set up, we're going to be transferring pretty much everything we have here now across to the new setup - user accounts, forums, posts etc. We're going to be doing a dry-run of it beforehand to make sure we get it all sorted, but we would like everyone to be aware that there will be a brief transitional period for everyone to get accustomed to the new forum when we're ready with it.

Of course, unlike our Orcy nature, we'll try to make all of this as painless as possible for all of you :)

Hey, that would be cool.

I think some place to store articles that are easily referenced are nice. Maybe even some way to chat about the articles after the articles?

Do you mean commenting on articles rather than a thread? That can certainly be done.

You know, I'm not sure. I mean, one hand, someone can go to the Tactics forum and say "I read the Checkerboard Tactica and I have questions...."

On the other, it might be neat to have something like a comments section underneath it so that comments don't get too buried in the forums. I can see someone discovering the article and then getting the wealth of comments on it right after reading it instead of having to go to the forums. Make sense?

Not sure which is best or preferred.

Well for a while we've wanted to have some of the best articles, be they tactics, modelling, or whatever on the mainsite. You can't sticky everything on the forums. Most of these will evolve out of a thread on the forums, say the hook for example, but I see your point. For those that don't comments would be useful. The main thing to avoid is 50% of people discussing an article in comments while 50% discuss it on the forum.

Ohhh.... a shiney new forum..... :wub:

Oh this is great. I have two things I would like to see on the new forum/site both idea's are stolen from heresy online. Please keep the emoticons though, they are awesome

1. The ability to quick reply (I think carpe noctum has this as well)
2. The ability to give out reputation (rep) to others if they do something well

Skar (2c)

If it's php you're "upgrading" to, then be sure to let me or Nagathi (via me) know if we can help out with the 'transitional period' :)


As for suggestions, I for one am not a fan of quick-reply; certainly it makes life "easier" (i.e. people can post more often) but the reservation that we had/have over on Asrai.org is that it encourages speed posting (and thus less thought, effort and content). Of course, that could just be us being sticklers...


On the other hand, the Rep. system I like very much. I've never been a fan of "promotion" based on post count (it just seems to encourage spam) having a system where awards (or Rep) are granted by merit, especially by other members of the community, is an excellent way of showing appreciation for the work a lot of members put in to the forum. Of course, you already have a medal system so a Rep system is a natural 'progression' from that; you have the medals for those things that are the big noticeable events on the site, but a Rep system would allow individual members to show their appreciation for all the little, every day things that help keep the site running smoothly :)

I like the idea of a "reputation" system :)

Of course, however, done in a more Orcy fashion: "Teef" for example.

And yes, we will be most certainly retaining the current smilies and the medals system :)

I thought Rep was a good idea until I saw this. Then I thought it was brilliant :)

I'm happy to have a look at medals or anything else again when it comes time to upgrade. I can't promise anything knowing how my free time fluctuates and I haven't coded anything since I looked at the medals last time, but I'm happy to give it a shot.

How about the ability to be able to embed video's into your posts. This could make the tutorials section a whole lot more interesting. I know a few people have been interested in making some video tutorials.

Also having a function were down size's your images would be great. It means members don't have to spend loads of time down sizing there pictures in photobucket or picture manager etc etc. The process can be a bit off putting for new members

I think we are also in need of a new home page that could have links to all the latest thread/topics. Could also have image of the day kind of thing even polls. Perhaps make an improved 'store' through which Da Warpath could sell it's orky merchandise such as T-shirts etc etc.

That all my idea's spent, I shall try and think up some more though

Skar (2c)

Some great ideas here, thanks folks. Most of these never even occured to me. The teef reputation system is pure genius. Things like a store, picture resizing, video embedding are all possible I know, so keep the ideas coming. I for one would love to see youtube battle reports embedded in posts! Now's your chance to speak up and get something added to DWP.

Finally to those offering technical help a HUGE thank you. I'm not the best at this but I get there in the end (as some of you saw with Animosity Campaigns), so any expert help is greatly appreciated.

We could have an ongoing thread where people can challenge each other with their latest and greatest combo's using an on-line dice rolling site or something similar built into the forum

Just an idea. Probably won't last long if you thought to include it

Oh and if you want to make a bit of cash perhaps offer to sponsor companies/podcasts ect ect

Skar (2c)

Asrai.org runs warhammer online pretty sucessfully. It doesn't require much forum software, so we could do it as things stand, but it'd need players willing to keep the games going.

Yep, the WFO Forum on Asrai.org has become one of our most popular forums even in the relatively short time since it was created. It's simple to play, ridiculously easy to implement re: forum software (literally, all you need is the ability for posters to include images, which of course you already have :D ) and is a great way to play Warhammer - members can play against each other even when seperated by thousands of miles, you can play as and when it is convenient (rather than having to set aside a 3 or 4 hour block for a 'real' game) and you don't need any figures at all, making it immensely useful for trying out different army builds.

All in all, I would thoroughly recommend getting WFO going!

Of course, if decide to give WFO a go and need a helping hand, I am at your service Bosses :D

I'd love to see modern forum software running along side a stylised and fully functional cms powered website. (Although it could be done by building a small set of specific Dreamweaver templates to apply across the site to achieve a similarly consistent site but retaining the flexibility of using static pages.) Either of these options would give da-warpath the the ability to make the most of the high quality content the o+g community produces.

All this It would require some careful management but the potential for something amazing is definitely there. I would be happy to lend a hand if desired, site mapping, designing, building, migrating content, improving accessibility, etc.

cb, could you explain in moron speak (pretend you're talking to a gobbo) what you just said! I'm not familiar with CMS or dreamweaver templates. :blush:

CMS = Content Management System
Dreamweaver = a software package for writing HTML (etc) code.
:lol:

Yep a content management system or sitewide use of detailed templates (or even just a few sitewide library items), would be a great way to tighten up navigation, (website place menu), how people get around the whole site.

This would allow users can easily jump (one logical click) from the forums to DWQ, then to hobby articles, back to forums, then to image gallery etc.

A content management system would be a good way to let all of moderators add content to the website (not just the forums). Although having that much input might not be required (or a good idea).

So using detailed templates and library items would make it easy for the webmaster (or underling developers) to add pages to the site, when supplied with refined content, (simultaneously updating the navigation manually via the library item).

Content like painting or modelling articles, tactics, etc. could have their own sections. This content could come directly from the moderators and/or every few months when exceptional user generated content appears on the forums it could be nominated to be added to the main pages of the website. This would be for things that are currently made sticky because they are so awesome/useful.

The best thing to do first would be to start drafting up a site map to help decide the site components and structure. If you want I could do this tonight when I get back from work, it might make more sense looking at an example sitemap?

That would be marvelous mate, thanks. I see what you mean. I did a similar thing for Da Warpath's campaign site here using Joomla, but it was quick and dirty as I had no idea what I was doing and Joomla is unfeasably tough to work with. The main goal would be something that wasn't too tough for some of us cack handed Mods and Admins to keep in good shape and update.

Categories I was considering for a front page would be tactics Articles, Modelling Articles, Fluff Articles, a Gallery, a links page, then some kind of central portal page that was the home page, like we have now.

As i said, the help is very much appreciated.

Ok... Using SlickPlan, I've pulled together a concept site map, trying to include everything I could think of that is fundamental enough to warrant a page.



Think of the sitemap as the navigational menu of the site, what have I missed or what should be removed, discuss.

Edit: Maybe I should offer a little more explanation. Similar things have been grouped into general categories containing a particular type of content, this keeps everything tight and structured for easy navigating, (using a mega drop down menu or something similar).

Chris this is fantastic thanks. Much clearer for my brain to see it all laid out like that. I guess my next question is, what CMS would you recommend for delivering something like that? The main criteria would be something that doesn't require advanced programming to update as none of the mods bar Jimbob I think are savvy with that side of things. Also though something that is flexible enough that if we got someone that really knows their stuff to write us somethings, it wouldn't look like my first website.

Unfortunately I'm not the best person to ask about CMS, I work on a large .gov websites that strangely don't use CMS, making me the CMS (Chris Management System). So I deal mainly with HTML and CSS, making content look decent, cutting out crap, making the site work well, sorting images, etc.

Like you I have used Joomla, a while ago and I was a bit unsure about it. All of the other sites my company build use ModX, which is supposed to be pretty good. The best thing to do if you got someone who really knew their stuff to build the website, would be just use what they we're most proficient in.

I guess it also depends on how much you realistically expect to be adding to the main pages of the website. As the forums are still obviously going to be a huge part of the site, where most of the content is posted in the first place, in chunks (day by day progress on someone painting a character for example).

I was thinking it might be a good idea to not update the other sections of the website too often. This way the content could be concentrated down to the highest quality, (the day by day progress painting a character could be stitched together into a single in depth painting guide), converting multiple forum posts into neat articles. This would be sort of like a hall of fame of the best user submissions, tweaked for main site publication by the admins. There could even be a guide for users on how get their content into the hall of fame, to make it as easy as possible for the admins.

Not including the gallery, (which would run on some gallery software), if there were say 2 or 3 high quality articles per month then you wouldn't necessarily need a CMS. The articles could be prepared by the non technical admin/moderators, then passed onto the Webmaster to add to the site.

That probably doesn't help very much, what does everybody else think?

I have a little Joomla experience too and I use a CMS for work every day (called "Refresh" but I'm not sure if it is available for public use or if it was written for us...). I have very little actual technical knowledge but I can handle the web-admin side of a CMS.

This looks like just the model we should follow though Chris - great stuff! :yarr!:

I'm the same, able to "handle the web-admin side of a CMS" but couldn't figure out how to describe it.

I googled "Refresh" and it looks like its quite expensive £200 per month! I think most of the web-admin sides of different CMSs are similar, which makes things a bit easier.

Something free/open source is probably the way to go.

Howdy

We can do CMS if that is what we want, but I would have to agree about this:

The layout and management of the site is easy enough to do if we have a committiee available to decide each week, or month etc what should move to the main site.

As to intergration of the two, it is easy enough to match the colors and graphics across both once we have all of them.

Keep the ideas coming!

peace :D

I agree. Once the page template is established it is fairly straight forward pasting in content and updating navigation, so adding a handful of articles etc. each month wouldn't take too long.

Has anybody had any design ideas for the new site, maybe this warrants a new thread?

Yeah lets hive this one off. Feel free to start a new thread for site design. This one can be a dumping ground for any more suggestions people have.

I've set up a new thread for design ideas.

Back on topic for this thread, what new forum software will we be using?

Right now it's being discussed. Probably either SImple Machines or PhPBB3. I used PhPBB3 when I converted the old animosity forums from invisionfree, so I know it works. That said a number of the newer forums, Warhammer EMpire and Ogre Stronghold for example, use SMF, so compatability with them would be easier with SMF.

As a reminder for myself, another feature I'd like to see on the new forums is an expanded set of post groups. Right now it only goes up to 3,000. As the forum is 6 years old and WGG has 12k posts, clearly we need to have a wider range!

^ Agreed!

Another note-to-Draig type thing from me: I really like the Today's active topics function we have here.

A lot of forums don't have this - they have the very annoying "Posts since your last visit" function instead. This means you have to read everything each time you visit or you may miss something important/interesting!

I don't like this! ^_^

^ Agreed!

Theo

Any juicy updates for us? :D

-Air

Not yet. I've been testing a few new features on the AC site that will likely make it over to the new forums. IN fact I might just use the code from AC and port in a new database and skin, as it might save a heap of time compared to setting up SMF from scratch. Remember this is a slow burner. Looking to get the bulk of the actual DB work donw over the Christmas Holidays.

Ok I'm getting there with the forum side of things. If you have anything you'd like to see added to the forum, now's the time to ask! I'll be looking to do a test run within a month or two.

More different sub-forums i guess? What weez wrote could be split up into "Battlereports" and "Warhammer background" For example. :)

That would be cool id it won't cause you too much trouble.

Theo

Good to hear the forum side of things is going well, I'm looking forward to seeing the new forums in action.

I'd would to offer to help with testing and things but I've just moved house and have no internet at home, stupid slow BT. :(

Splitting or adding forums is pretty easy and can be done whatever software we choose. I'm more after features that aren't included on this forum, like say a portal page or whatever.