ok blakesterville

also yes, please post any comments, questions, concerns or suggestions here

The first part of the reconstruction has taken place. So here is a quick overview of what has happened already:

-We have switched from phpbb 2 to phpbb 3
-We have changed some of the forum design, (more changes will be made later)
-The site banner has been changed. Thanks to wwecruz for making it
-Avatars and all your info is now displayed on the right of your posts
-We will be limiting ads with images
-New members forum has been moved to Site/Staff category
-Post ranks have been changed
-Quick replies are now allowed
-Functional advanced forum search
-The forums can now be browsed using Smartphones (however only as a guest for right now)


So that is what has happened so far, but there is still more on the way

Let us know what you think of the changes so far. Also would you like a facebook login application?

I have noticed that there is a new banner as well!

It looks great. I just logged on and noticed that everything was changed.

Mayorm has done a great job here.

It's definitely looking amazing. A great banner made by wwecruz, and great upgrades!

I love the new layout and new features. It looks awesome

We are also going to start working on a portal, so we'll be getting that up in a couple weeks. Glad you all like the changes. I'm not sure but I may work on the posts so that the avatar, and post info and all that is back on the left of the post. But I'm still deciding if I want to do that or not.

The portal is now up. It's actually done a day early which I am glad about. The chatbox has also been moved to the portal to attract people there. There's a lot of stuff to check out. It can be identified by the "simmania news" link on the navbar. The site's homepage is set to that. If you have any suggestions, please let either me or Mayorm know. I expect to make some minor changes over the next few days.

-blakesterville.

It looks great blakesterville, great work

I'll still be doing work on it over the next few days to improve it, so there will probably be some slight changes ahead. Nothing too big, probably. If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them here. I'd like to see what exactly the people want in the portal so that I can make it work for Simmania.

So I've been looking at the Developer Diaries recently and I feel as though we need to do more to get people replying to the threads over there too. I like CJ, DDs whatever you want to call them so I believe those sections of the forums should always have a lot of people replying to the threads. Anyone have some ideas as to what could be done to get more people replying to the wonderful DDs over there?

This is more of a union-oriented thing, but you could feature a journal picture in the new "Sim Mania" header and below it caption the image in the background. You could change it, say, once a month, to a new journal. Like this month it could be Dragon Islands, next month it could be Cattala, etc.

And the announcements scrollbar can do something too

With the announcements scrollbar, there is no way to actually make it exclusive to city journals. We really don't have any good automated options for that, and typing HTML and doing it that way, while it is a possibility, would be time-consuming and difficult to maintain. I had to do some of that on the portal and I generally don't like typing plain HTML, quite personally.

I thought about adding a link to the city journals section as I was updating the "getting started with Simmania" widget on the portal, but I think that would make it too crowded. I'm debating whether to remove the Simmania's story link from it and replacing it with something promoting city journals. It may seem like a stupid question, but I was wondering what Mayorm thought of that idea (or the whole getting started with simmania widget altogether). I'm not very good at this kind of thing, so I've been trying to be careful as I work on stuff like that.

Speaking of the getting started widget, though, I updated it to make it more welcoming. I'm still trying it out to see if people like it, for the most part. It's mostly targeted at new members and guests who may not know as much about the community.

I was just throwing stuff out there.

EDIT: Since writing this post, I've done some additional work with the widget. It's now split into the "forums" and "new members" widgets. I think it looks better that way with the updated content.
-blakesterville

first off I apologize for putting the post about the Developer diaries in this thread, I meant to post in the suggestion box.

Also K50, I have thought about that idea before but it would take a lot of work to do something like that.
Blakesterville- I love the getting started information you included on the portal. It looks great, and I think it is very welcoming to anyone new to the site.

Mayorm: Well, it would be possible to do an HTML widget. If you can write HTML by hand, that would be the easiest way to do it, but if not you can get something like openoffice.org (which is freeware) and it can create HTML pages. Unfortunately, both Word and Openoffice put a lot of metadata in the documents when you save them as HTML, and that makes it difficult to maintain without going into openoffice. You would, for something like that, literally have to put the links and content that you want in the widget in manually. It would take a while to design, but I doubt it would be too much to maintain.

Just suggesting that. I would go ahead and pull up a design, but I don't have the time or stability for that sort of thing (particularly to maintain it). At this point, my activity at Simmania is kind-of coming when I have a good time for doing so and I'm sure everyone has probably noticed my reduced activity here. If you want me to attempt to pull off a design, I would be glad to, but there is no guarantee as to when I could complete it.

Just suggesting it.

-blakesterville

well no I say we just do without it for right now. I'm a bit busy myself to work on HTML (and I would have to learn it HTML first) and as you have said your here when ever you have the time to, and feel like dropping by. So I say we just keep what we have right now.

the new site design looks good

Mayorm: HTML is not actually a programming language, which makes it fairly easy to learn. Basically, it's a form of markup that is a little more specific with the formatting of your text. It's basically just text where, whenever you want to format stuff, you actually have to type the formatting code in specifically. It's not too difficult once you get the hang of it, though. There are many tutorials out on the internet on it, and I found this one by searching for HTML tutorials on google:http://htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/

In general, you don't actually need to memorize all of the stuff that's available in HTML, and especially for these widgets. I don't memorize very much of it at all, but instead use a reference when I need it. It only took a couple days for me to get the hang of using it. You can also use something like openoffice to create HTML pages if you don't like typing it in as HTML text. It's not what I did because I didn't have to type very much HTML for the portal so I didn't think it was worth it.

If you ever want to create HTML widgets, it's fairly easy. You can just go to the Portal management -> structure -> then click the "Create a widget" button and copy/paste the HTML into the widget source box (in case you don't already know this). You can of course look at the widget source for the welcome widgets I had as well. If you ever need to edit it, there's nothing too complicated in there, so making edits should be fairly easy. Note that <br> creates a new line. Between paragraphs, you'll need two of them, so don't forget that if you do make edits to it. Otherwise things will look a bit messy.

I'm just throwing this stuff out for reference.

-blakesterville.

True, HTML technically isn't a programming language, however it is a language used in internet programming and design. While some could use Flash, ASP, or other more advanced languages, HTML is what makes the basic structure of webpages. Usually the main language a page uses can be found simply in the file name extension of the page, (this isn't .com, or .net), just look on simmania, and the index.htm means that it's written in HTML, or aspx is ASP, etc.

Any good HTML editor would let you use WYSIWYG, which is a complex layout of HTML tools, such as text formatting, images, tables, and other objects. And HTML coding is relatively simple to learn and understand, and some common controls in BBCode are the same/extremely similar to HTML, because BBCode is just an implementation/extension of HTML.

Like blakesterville suggested, OpenOffice.org is a great freeware (means it's free to use) program and contains an HTML editor, however it's not highly extensible. I use Kompozer, which contains a lot more formatting and authoring tools, and can even connect to and publish webpages on a domain. This is what kompozer looks like, all controls are neat and organized and quite easy to spot
https://2img.net/h/i798.photobucket.com/albums/yy264/joshriddle5555/kpz-1.jpg

yeah, but right now I don't have the time to go through the tutorials, and practice with HTML