Okay, Mike's Herculean efforts on the Member pages and Lummox's progress on Dream Daemon are shaming me into getting some work done. Next up on my plate is moving the hub pages from the C++ to the Perl backend and adding new hub page functionality.
I'm not sure we've covered this previously, but the BYOND website and hub infrastructure were originally created in C++, and raw C++ with almost no libraries used at that. Everything was built from scratch.
C++ is not the friendliest language for implementing web functionality or for text-based processing, and especially not when you are building everything from scratch. On the other hand, Perl is a text-processing language with a rich set of libraries available to make it easy to generate web pages and access databases and the like. And object-oriented Perl provides a nice clean way to solve problems.
So a few years ago I built a new Perl-based web infrastructure and experimented with it by creating a new admin system for the BYOND staff. That went well, and we started implementing most of our new web functionality, such as the Member pages, with the Perl backend using modern program methodologies such as template-based text generation. This resulted in a vastly simpler, easier to maintain code base (I mean, I can't even express how much simpler) than the original C++ infrastructure. So much so that I coldly left Mike to handle the C++ while I cuddled up to the warm and friendly Perl and promptly tried to forget everything I almost knew about C++.
In the intervening time, Mike has significantly enhanced the Perl infrastructure and we've managed to solve performance issues and such to our satisfaction. So it's our desire to move more and more of the website over to the Perl backend, thereby allowing us to make changes much faster than is possible in the C++ (as evidenced by all Mike's work to upgrade the Perl-based Member pages).
Now that we have this cool new guild functionality in place, we want to extend the hub pages to include guild-related information and whatever else makes sense. So as the first step, I'm in the process of porting the current hub page functionality over to the Perl.
While I'm doing that (hopefully the first pass can be mostly handled this weekend), here's your chance to give us ideas for how the hub pages should be upgraded.
So, how should hub pages be changed?
ID:26689
 Feb 2 2007, 3:59 pm
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Let's have some fun >=)
1. I think games should be able to have an associated guilds list.(Duh) 2. Maybe, you could add another button called "View Screenshots", and if that person was a BYOND Member they could upload screen shots of their game sort of like a preview gallery. It might be something like IGN has set up. http://media.pc.ign.com/media/771/771526/imgs_1.html 3. It'd be nice to have some sort of blog feed where you could supply a BYOND Blog and have display/summarise/link to latest posts. 4.This is a bit off topic but we're getting a isguildmember() right? It would go along with the associated guilds list if we had a general isassociatedguildmember() That's all I can think of now, I'll post some more later. | |
Worldweaver wrote:
2. Maybe, you could add another button called "View Screenshots", and if that person was a BYOND Member they could upload screen shots of their game sort of like a preview gallery. It wouldn't be fair, if they were limited to members only. There would have to be someway to link to images on another server. | |
Smoko wrote:
Worldweaver wrote: Nah, we pay money for these extra perks, of course it's fair. | |
Worldweaver wrote:
Smoko wrote: the game owner could just upload some screen shots using tinypic.com and put them into their hub or something | |
Soil wrote:
Worldweaver wrote: It wouldn't look as nice? | |
delete em
edit: jk xD | |
You guys are basically arguing over nothing- sure, non-members would have to go the the effort of linking to some other image host. That's why it'd be more awesome to be a BYOND member and have it nice and built in. :P
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I still say we have a blank page that we can use any html, maybe even php, to edit
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I say you let us edit your css.
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I agree with Soil
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I disagree.
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How come World?
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Manio wrote:
How come World? Because: 1. We'd get a ton of horribly ugly pages. 2. That's just ripe for abuse. | |
Worldweaver wrote:
Manio wrote: Ah yes. And also not so very good HTML coders would die | |
i like eating babies
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Worldweaver wrote:
Nah, we pay money for these extra perks, of course it's fair. Then that would make non members pissed, more than loosing the pager did. There is no reason for not letting them have their own screen shot thing(If it were made), because it would hardly use any of BYONDs bandwidth. It would also give members games an unfair advantage. Because, I never buy a game with out reading about it, and looking at screen shots. And I bet I'm not the only one. | |
I like the idea of a separate screenshots page.
Since CSS is out because of the positioning kerfuffle, how about being able to customise colours? * Page background (to replace the default white) * Hub entry background (to replace the default light-orange on the games site, or the grey on the developer site) * Text colour. * Border colour of hub entry block (default is blue on games site, dark blue on dev. site) * Border colour of hub entry information (I mean the "Version X" table, with the Download/Forum/etc. links - the defaults are the same as the border colour of the entire containing box) You could even include a system to reorder the page completely, rather like the new blog stuff works. Consider http://games.byond.com/hub/Zilal/Lexiconomy In the non-sidebar portion of that page, we have: * Text heading (Lexiconomy) * Banner * Author name + link * "Now Live" banner * Caption (How good are you at total nonsense?) * Information box * Description * Separation between top and bottom boxes, containing a heading (Live Games) * A box for each live game It would be sweet to be able to reorder or even omit any of these things. It would be nice to be able to include more than one of any given item, as well: For example, you might want two separators, or two (different!) blocks of descriptive text. Ideas for additional drop-in bits of content: Guilds this game is in. Other games by this author. Related games (i.e. what other games are in the same guild as this game). Miscellaneous text boxes (like the description), in which a basic subset of HTML is allowed. That's all I can think of right now. Edit: Here's a crazy idea: Multiple pages per hub entry. That way the screenshots page, for example, could just be a sub-page of the hub entry, which just has a heading, a link back to the main entry, and a bunch of screenshots. You could also include player guides, more detailed instructions, anything you liked. Probably a bit time-consuming to implement, but it would be nice to have. =) ...Anyway, there's the full-blown vision. Remove features from that until you have something manageable. ;-) | |
Smoko wrote:
Worldweaver wrote: Maybe that'd give them some incentive to help out BYOND. | |
but maybe you could remove the tables and the download now, forum links etc...
like, you could leave it up to us to put a link to the download or forums or the website and get rid of the tables
http://i7.tinypic.com/2ijm938.gif
or you can let us work from a blank page and put a link to byond at the bottom