Waking Dead

As is my want, I’ve decided to make some rather fundamental changes to the site over the coming weeks, starting this weekend. The first thing you’ll have noticed is the new lick of paint; although Contaminated was a fantastic theme, I needed something a bit more robust for the new features I’m adding. First of all, here’s a list of things that are going to be disappearing:

Community Forums

They didn’t get much love really, did they? Seeing as there’s only about 20 of us in this online community, there’s not really much call for such a verbose set of forums. Besides, it was becoming more of a sounding board for me anyway, and I have the blog I’ll be transferring the static content across to the Wiki over the next few days before removing the forums entirely. Anything guild-related will now appear on the front page blog; the only downside to this that only I can post stuff, but anybody can comment so we’ll see how it pans out for now. I’ll be taking a backup of the forum database should there be a need to reinstate it later on, but for now we’ll make do with the blog.

Additional Pages

This has been on the cards for a while, really. I’ll be moving the info on the additional pages to the Wiki over the coming week or so, and removing the page links. The biggest job will be to move the Collections page over, so that might take me a little longer. Either way I think it’s prudent to make better use of the Wiki, particularly as I can set up additional user accounts to edit it. I’ll be setting these up once the content has been moved across.

OK, so that’s what’s disappearing; here’s a list of new features I’m adding to the site:

Sub-Categories

Seeing as the blog is now the central resource for everything community-related, I’ll be adding a bunch of new categories to make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

Events Calendar

No community is worth it’s salt without a decent calendar of events, and I’ll be adding one to this very site. Primarily it will serve to highlight any upcoming events, both in-game for our MMO guilds, and also out of game so we’re all aware of what’s going on. Big Apocalypse game planned for the Bank Holiday? We’ll stick it on the calendar.

Slimbox

It’s a tiny, lightweight version of Lightbox. What’s Lightbox? Well, you know on other blogs you get nice pop-up images when you click on them in a post? That’s Lightbox. Functionality should be up today, and hopefully get retroactively applied to all previous posts.

Wiki

OK, so the Wiki already exists (bet you didn’t know anything about it, right?) but I’m planning on making much greater use of it. Initially I’ll be moving all our static guild information from the forum over to it, giving each in-game guild it’s own set of pages. We can put up charters, member lists and other snippets of info on the Wiki, making it a bit easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

And that’s about it for now. I have a few other things lined up but I’m still undecided about them so I’ll keep them to myself for now. Really though, there’s a lot for me to be getting on with – especially as the WAR headstart is tomorrow – so I’m trying not to take on too much for now. As usual, post away with your comments and I’ll try to take on board any critiscism in a mature way… by completely ignoring you