Hello Everyone,

Just wanted to let everyone know I'm working on a few things that can be expected to keep you connected to Simmania where ever you go

I can't tell you specifically what is in store for us this year. I'm sure you know by now I like to keep my upgrades and work a surprise But I can tell you that some of our new features will be released and unveiled to you in the coming weeks. Here is a rough schedule for the releases:

Feature 1: Scheduled for Release May 15-18- This feature will allow you to recieve site/ simcity news
Feature 2: Scheduled for Release June 2012- This will allow to connect to the site on the go, and from other sites.

Now I know we have a long time until the holiday season (for those of you in Europe I mean Christmas) but you can expect a major renovation/ upgrade project around that time. And I don't mean just a new design Provided I have enough funds, we are looking at a total overhaul, forums, smileys, design, host file exchange, the works. But agian expect that around December 2012-Early 2013


This summer we also have some amazing parties and events planned, which include but are not limited to:
Simmania's 3 year Aniversary
Seminars by Simlabs
Stanley Cup Watch Party
World Series Watch Party
Olympic Watch Party

Also I'm hoping we can get the MOTMs back up and running.

Its shaping up to be a great summer and a great year here so be on the look for everything mentioned

Looking forward to it.
Unless we can rack up more supporting members I don't know how well a file exchange would work though. But then again it's not late 2012-early 2013 so we'll see what happens.

Thanks for all the hard work you have put into making this the
best sc4 fan site over the past 3 years !

As we discussed last night in chat, I hope to get a few seminars
going this summer , hosted by Sim Labs !

I am glad to see the site so active.

Regards, Brian

I have to say.. this site is more successful than any other small SC4 site I've seen. And it's the only one I care to stay involved in.

I look forward to seeing how the site evolves. I just changed the design on my forumotion forum, and have looked into some of the things you mentioned. But my site is a wee bit too small for that, not to mention everything that has to go into it.

Good luck... hope to still be around here while this goes on.

Feature 1 Now Online!

Simmania is now on Twitter! We will give daily updates on the site, Simcity, and CitiesXL. If you have a Twitter Account please follow us. Click the link below to be linked to our Twitter.



https://twitter.com/#!/SimmaniaForums

Wow! Great job, really liking the planned updates. Looking forward to seeing them all implemented!

Cool! Although I don't use twitter

You should somehow incorporate it into the portal, I think we did that on USNW on one of our old portals I don't know how though...

twitter has an html widget of sorts iirc... if not it more than likely works off of an RSS feed which you should be able to copypaste into the FM forum widget.. but it's not in HTML so i'm not quite sure.

Sounds great. I'm exited to see where Simmania will go during the next few months.

Also, I checked the portal settings and noticed a lot of new widgets and tools that I didn't see when I created the Simmania News page last year. I feel like the site is probably ready for a refreshed look on the homepage/portal (especially given that it probably wasn't the best layout from the start). What does everyone think of the idea?

well, looking at the portals and homepages of other sites.. I think the structure really needs refining/refreshment. For instance maybe a sort of game news, featured UB, site announcements blog of sorts and the login panel and active topics to the right of that... much like what many other sites have.

I'm looking forward into this!

If we remodel the portal, we need to include our twitter feed

Speaking of which: We have our first follower

As for the twitter feed, I'm working on getting a new widget working that will give us the twitter feed. It's going to need some work, so it will probably take some time to get it up, but either way, the new portal should have the option of having a twitter feed in the near future.

[Edit: The widget it set up and it works. It's not on the Simmania News page yet, so it is not public. I did set it up under a duplicate of the Simmania News page that is visible only through ACP, and admins can work on the duplicate portal there without it being public until it is complete. ]

I followed! :O

I got my friend to follow so we now have 2 followers

And to me the amount of followers means nothing
sorry for being a party pooper

Just followed the twitter, guys! I can't wait to see what happens this summer!

The Portal (Simmania News page) now has the twitter feed set up. It doesn't look great yet, but it's a start. Work is still under way on the new portal, which will have a completely reworked structure, and of course it will also have the new twitter widget put on there.

Noticed the widget when I logged in, nice work.

I should be getting back into everything to help you guys out, and start sending out some Twitter updates now that I'm back home from vacation

But I really love the work that has been done while I was away.

I'm glad to hear that you like the work. K50 and I are still in the tweaking stage on the new portal. We've got it up and running, and minor adjustments will probably be made over the next several days.

There are several things that work differently on the new portal. It is more content-focused, trying to focus only on the important content. (I probably should have had that in mind more when I created the original portal. ) We used quite a lot of HTML to make it happen, and the majority of what you see on there is custom, not coming from forum-motion. Using HTML gave us much more control over the actual content, feel, and layout of the portal. Editing some of the content on there will require editing the HTML code, but it took K50 and I less than two weeks to do the portal from start to finish, so simple maintenance should be pretty easy.

Either way, I think that the new portal should last a while. Now that the portal is out of the way, we should be able focus on other developments for Simmania.

blakesterville wrote: We used quite a lot of HTML to make it happen, and the majority of what you see on there is custom, not coming from forum-motion. Using HTML gave us much more control over the actual content, feel, and layout of the portal.

I really like the portal and can admire the work that went into it. I took down the portal at Simopsis as part of the update. The standard things you can do with forumotion honestly aren't superb. When I renovated the site this time around I used HTML, CSS and Javascript found around the web applicable to forumotion. It's actually why I stopped using Invision and switched to PunBB, it allowed me to edit the template code.

I hope to eventually have a portal like the one here at Simmania or from the USNW site, but that is going to take my a while. I am not great with HTML yet...

Anyways, thought I would say that the portal looks great, you did guys did a great job with it.
Edit: Also followed Simmania's Twitter via the my forum's twitter account.

Well, thing is, phpbb3 doesn't allow for template editing and this site and any FM-hosted site could do a ton with the template editing.. but it's very advanced and requires some HTML knowledge to actually do any changes without breaking everything.

The only thing I've used the template editor for is to change the registration agreement (it's very unfriendly and basically contradicts itself).. and add antibot measures (using Q/A).

The significant advantage of phpbb3 over bb2 is that bb3 is much newer and looks nicer.. and is widely used. bb2 is the older version of bb3.. I've wondered why you can't use the template editing on bb3 and invision. I agree too, that FM's basic features aren't very flexible.. and there are a lot of annoyances. I generally dislike FM.. but it's a crap-ton better than a lot of the alternatives. It just means that free things are never all too good

Of course, provided that the admins decide to move to a new host.. it'd be cool to see it hosted "traditionally", without relying on the host to do the work for you.. that is, the site is uploaded through FTP to the server and can have its own directory.. after registering a domain. It's how most other sites do it and it provides much more configuration.. and it's not unfriendly to people who don't have much knowledge as far as networking goes.. although FTP is a bit difficult to use at first.