New site

What do you want to see here? Some more categories, forums, and mods? Hmm...
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Lucifer
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New site

Post by Lucifer »

Ok, so I've been working on a new website, sorta.

Here's where everything is right now.

DaveCMS
https://launchpad.net/davecms

Main site on Launchpad
https://code.launchpad.net/~armagetrona ... d/mainsite

Currently, Armagetron Web Developers have write access to both of these, but there's not a lot y'all can just jump in on yet, unless you really want to. :)

What I've done so far:

I finally spun davecms out from my web comic to serve as a standalone CMS. Unfortunately, in doing so, I had to disable both the web comic generator and the blog generator. But I've rearranged a few things, and now it has support for themes. :) After getting it to where it could create and generate its own default website, I created the aforementioned main site bzr repo.

To get it to where we can run the main site with davecms:

First, its important to point out that even the basic site (with a few additions) as it is with davecms is somewhat superior to the existing site. For one thing, when we're ready to deploy it, I'm anticipating z-man setting it up to automatically update the site whenever someone pushes to the launchpad repo. Since that repo can be accessed by the Armagetron Web Developers, that'll open it up for other people to work on it. Second, the template system is more involved and uses a wiki-like syntax, so for most of what anybody will be doing with it, you don't need to know html or anything like that. Just something that's pretty similar to what the wiki uses.

We need a news module and a screenshots module, both built in to davecms. As of right this minute, unfortunately, I'm pretty much the only person who can work on those, because there needs to be some fundamentals put in place before modules can be written reasonably.

DaveCMS needs a decent preprocessor. The main thing we need it for is for the linked youtube videos. The preprocessor should take something written in a format we declare, convert it to something meaningful for txt2tags (adding in whatever extra information needs to be added from within davecms), and write it right before the templates get processed.

DaveCMS has to get a release in a tarball version that also works in Windows. It should work on any posix system as-is, but hasn't been at all tested in Windows. It's a command-line utility, though, so I'm not sure the Windows requirement is strong. But there does need to be a release that does all the stuff we need it to do, can be marked "stable", and we can leave the main site running with it for a long time. That's not as far away as it sounds, though. Remember, it's code that's been running my web comic for 10 years now.

In the future:

Right now, I'm adapting the existing design to something encapsulated by DaveCMS. In the future, obviously, I'll be working on making ArmaUnified work with it, too. As of right now, to get all the way to ArmaUnified, we need the wiki upgraded to 1.27 (and set to ArmagetronLegacy until we're ready to throw the switch on Armaunified), we need the forums' armaunified adjusted to match (and possibly the forums getting upgraded/moved), and we need the remaining work on the main site.

It sounds like a lot, but it's not as bad as it sounds. ;) This is where I'd include a screenshot of my work so far, but I'm feeling a bit burnt and want to do something else, so, sorry about that.
Image

Be the devil's own, Lucifer's my name.
- Iron Maiden
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