Dramborn
Dev Diary
Porting pages for recruits
I have migrated the information from the forums regarding the following: One Rule, Officer Directory, Kin Constitution, Commonly Asked Questions. These have been made into pages viewable by anyone, and the links can be seen in a link widget available on the Join, Pictures, Events, and Craft sections. The pages are editable by Officers and are persistent.
I have copied other forum information into our Wiki as well, such as the Hall of Fame and several guides. I cannot find any more guides that need porting from the forums, so I would like to remove the stickied guides when I make the forum changes. I'll outline the proposed changes before anything happens.
I am prepping to fix the Events and Craft sections over the next day or so. I have posted a topic asking for anyone interested in having their crafting information put on the site to post their info. When I get a good bunch of names, I'll fix it up nice.
I'm also looking into the Rapid Raid software and how our Roster fits into the site. Apparently players can claim all the characters they have and then fill in their availability, which will help us plan raids a bit better based on when people can play. I'll work out some sort of guide... More
by Dramborn on 2012-02-10 04:23:11
Redoing the Forums
Okay, I thought about this all day, because it just wasn't sitting right with me. I think about things like this a lot actually, and is one of the reasons I am pursuing a degree in education. I could have just as easily been a librarian. Let's see if I can describe it succinctly.
Before I started this cleanup, the forums were a sort of hodgepodge. A lot of times, forums get this way, and groups start to sticky well-written and important topics until there are pages and pages of them before anything new. So my idea was to avoid the forum bloat by converting forum posts into wiki articles, mostly those that detail kin protocol or game guides. Sounds good so far, other than the amount of translation work that needs to be done. No worries, it's just work.
So I committed to making this idea work; however, the next question became "What do I do with the rest of the forums?" All the cool stuff will go into the wiki, where it should be cataloged and read, but how do we encourage people to use the forums. Forums should be like a discussion anyways, where the amount of information might not take up as much space as I like to use. They should be lean, since they were designed more to coordinate things... More
by Dramborn on 2012-02-10 04:21:45
Starting the site cleanup
The website was starting to look a little dirty. So I cleaned it up. It still has a long way to go too.
However, here's a short list of what I have done so far:
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I made a new header. This can be changed if you want.
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I changed the Primary Navigation. I felt that the old ones lacked logical structure. I will be associating other aspects of this site in a loose hierarchy under these new Nav Buttons.
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I changed some of the widgets. They don't all show up in the same place, resulting in cleaner pages and focusing people's awareness on the important stuff on the different pages.
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I renamed the Home Page to "News". That's the focal point for our members, and sits on the right.
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I moved new recruit information to a page called "Join". This now has only the welcome message and the links to new recruit info.
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Crafting and Events are new. I will be fleshing those out in the next few weeks. Crafting will get a list of all Guilded Crafters, starting with the Masters. Events will list recurring non-raid activities for members.
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Raiding was beefed up to accommodate the Greycloaks. The Rapid Raid system looks pretty good, and I threw a couple extra widgets on the left sidebar that people... More
by Dramborn on 2012-02-10 03:32:09