The Other Site

[Concord]

Ok, it has been mentioned in numerous threads and posts, and many times I know I have written, "when we have the competition/promotion/noob/et al/ website, this will be on there."

Its time to start building this beast. It is going to take some work, because there are many parts to it. But lets make this manageable, because most of us are busier than I am (spring break). I broke this down as detailed as I thought a coder would need. There are 3 main sections.

homepage
--news
--best of player tweets (more on this below)
--most active forum topic
--recent videos
--upcoming tournaments

Competitions/Players
team accounts have
--admin privileges on team calendar
--editing privileges on global calendar
--admin privileges on a team profile page (can grant a player account privileges)
--sign up privileges for tournaments


player accounts have
--editing privileges on player profile page
--editing privileges on team calendar (if they're on a team)
--posting privileges on forums
--sign up privileges for random open team player pool and non-random open teams
--sign up for organized matches

tournament leader accounts have
--editing privileges on global calendar
--creation privileges for tournament pages
--some other promotional privileges


team calendar has
--events
----event type is defined "Practice" "Meeting" "Challenge" "Fun Match" "Tournament"

global calender has
--tournaments ("20th Tronic Ladle!")
--organized matches (like monkey's idea, these are player posted)
--open challenges ("we want a match against anyteam")
--private challenges ("we want a challenge against CT")

team profile page has
--Team Members (and the links to their pages)
--Team Member history
--Battle History
--twitter-esque microblog (140 chars long)
--team logo

player profile page has
--Member of Team
--Membership history
--Battle History
--twitter-esque microblog (140 chars long)
--forum profile

Forums
-competition forum
----each account can only post once per thread, this keeps discussion on point and succinct, instead of multipage odysseys
----reply rating system
-player recruitment forum
----"We are looking for a european defender, apply within"
-conflict resolution forum
----community passes judgement on the problem

Tournament Pages
--A team sign up form (the team account signs up, players automatically added)
--A player sign up form (sign into the player pool, sign up on an open team asking for players)
--brackets
--clocks

Server Browser
--um yeah

Newbie Section
--Tutorial archives
--Video gallery
--skype mentoring program
--about tronic



Thats my vision of this beast. Can we get started? I'm good at the big picture, and even decent at the html/css level, but there are many people in this community more talented than I at this sort of stuff.

So, I know that durka (afl) lacka (kotg), sol (c-t.com), rogue (vcl.com) epsy (fff/tst) and manta/destiny (lagtest.net) have done work along these lines. I also know all of these people are probably pretty busy. But if we work together, folks. I'm going to look into to Drupal, it may work nicely for our purposes.

Lets put some work in now, it will pay off immediately, even 16 teams of 8 has 128 people, organizing 128 people on the internet can be challenging as is. Making this thing look awesome, as opposed to the wiki which looks distinctly un-awesome, will boost the people who play. It makes our gameplay community look like the community it is, and gives us some new tools. We do have a rather complex society here, clans, teams, players, organizers, developers, publicists, and to an outsider it is challenging to make heads and tails of it all. If we can put all this in one place, and make it look nice, that outsider's task become much easier.

[-=VcL.Rajinn]

Wow. looks very overwhelming. I thought I was just making a site for us that wanted to help the new guys with Armagetron on team speak and such....

Although it would be nice to see your above features come to life on some unbelievably nice web page, this months and months of work.

Looking at this Drupal, http://drupal.org/about, I find that it may be a good idea, but I don't like how it's free. Something that looks this "nice" has probably got some major security holes, and probably very hard to manage. However, I may set this up on my domain and see for myself.

EDIT: Drupal is lame... very very hard to manage -.-

Although, it does look to have all the necessary items in which you seek.

http://vcl-clan.com/drupal/

[Lacrymosa]

As I already said in the other thread about this tournament website, I am familiar with Joomla! (a CMS similar to Drupal) and also with Webdesign in general. But Rogue is right, creating a site with all the features you've mentioned will probably take some time, although that depends on the number of people working at it.

[Concord]

perhaps we should further break this down into sections that we could start working on

teams

calendar, events, open team sign ups

forums

[Concord]

homepage
--news


Competitions/Players
team accounts have
--admin privileges on team calendar
--editing privileges on global calendar
--admin privileges on a team profile page (can grant a player account privileges)
--sign up privileges for tournaments


player accounts have
--editing privileges on player profile page
--editing privileges on team calendar (if they're on a team)
--posting privileges on forums
--sign up privileges for random open team player pool and non-random open teams
--sign up for organized matches

tournament leader accounts have
--editing privileges on global calendar
--creation privileges for tournament pages
--some other promotional privileges


team calendar has
--events
----event type is defined "Practice" "Meeting" "Challenge" "Fun Match" "Tournament"

global calender has
--tournaments ("20th Tronic Ladle!")
--organized matches (like monkey's idea, these are player posted)


team profile page has
--Team Members (and the links to their pages)
--team logo

player profile page has
--Member of Team
--twitter-esque microblog (140 chars long)
--forum profile

Forums
-competition forum
----each account can only post once per thread, this keeps discussion on point and succinct, instead of multipage odysseys
----reply rating system
-player recruitment forum
----"We are looking for a european defender, apply within"
-conflict resolution forum
----community passes judgement on the problem

Tournament Pages
--A team sign up form (the team account signs up, players automatically added)
--A player sign up form (sign into the player pool, sign up on an open team asking for players)

Fooling around with just drupla modules I was able to accomplish most of this to a satisfactory level. With some of the communities php skills we should be able to do well. I ran a local mamp on my macbook, so I can't share. Perhaps some one could set up a space somewhere on a server until we finish, at which point fundraising for a domain name.

I can do some pictures, though

[teen]

I think that vcl clan had one of the best websites that hosted a tournament thing.

I love the way they arranged their settings and i think it owuld be most organized in the way your thinkin concs

[DDMJ]

Drupal is nice, but I agree Joomla! is better and easier to use. On top of that, it has many themes to make it look really aesthetically pleasing.

One thing I do know however, is that with these CMS's, it's a bitch to create your own page in which you can edit the actual source code (using PHP for example).

Anyways, I noticed you wanted a server browser. I used ed/wrtl's script located at http://crazy-tronners.com/wrtl/ and came up with this:

http://durka.ath.cx
http://twisted-rats.co.cc (same link)

[Lucifer]

It's been a few years since I've worked with this stuff, but here's what I learned way back when (and believe is still likely to be true).

Joomla (formerly Mambo) is a gold-plated turd. It looks really nice, and there are some impressive-looking themes, but the 3rd party components and modules uniformly suck, and the internal APIs you'd use to write your own components and modules also uniformly suck. I used to get paid to write components and modules for Joomla, spent two years doing it, and hated every minute of it. Out of the box, Joomla looks very impressive and is quick and easy to get going.

Drupal, on the other hand, has some really great 3rd party add-ons. They mostly integrate very nicely with the entire site (which Joomla crap does not). Internal APIs are really wonderful, and you can quite literally make the thing do anything you want. There's a lot of power available to third party modules, and there's a lot of really good third party modules. However, out of the box, Drupal takes a fair amount of work to setup.

I've run my website with each of them, and Drupal was the clear winner. I use a home-grown CMS now, because I found that at the end of the day, two things were clear: If you want good forums, you need dedicated forum software. If you want good article serving, you need dedicated article serving software, etc. The other thing is that every single CMS out there sharply constricts what you can do, and it's never clear until you're already so deep in it that you're stuck.

When it came to developing themes, I found both of them equally bad, with the exception that Drupal's theme engine was very extensible.

So, my recommendation is to keep separate sites. If you really want, we can dig up some nice ajax widgets to tie everything together the way Facebook and Google Apps do it.

[Lucifer]

Sorry for the double post, but I wasn't going to ignore this:

Looking at this Drupal, http://drupal.org/about, I find that it may be a good idea, but I don't like how it's free. Something that looks this "nice" has probably got some major security holes, and probably very hard to manage. However, I may set this up on my domain and see for myself.

Right, just like Linux, which is also free, has a long reputation of being full of holes, and Windows, which is not free, has such a wonderful history of protecting users' privacy. </sarcasm>

Armagetron Advanced is also free. So, what are you saying, exactly?

Better learn more about the topic. Across the board, open source (aka Free as in Freedom) software has a much better record with regard to security than closed source software. It has to, anybody can find holes and fix them.

[Concord]

Yeah Lucifer, I didn't bother responding to that part, thanks for confirming my skepticism I just ignored his warnings and installed drupal anyway. frankly, what have you got to lose with free software?

[-=VcL.Rajinn]

I think that vcl clan had one of the best websites that hosted a tournament thing.

I love the way they arranged their settings and i think it owuld be most organized in the way your thinkin concs

Thanks teen. I could set this back up for concord to use if he so chooses.

And thanks Lucifer for that post.

[Concord]

I got a gracious offer from F!Infamous as well

It seems I need some help transferring everything over and whatnot.

Theres the database which is easy enough to export/import (even I can do that *I hope*) but I have added something like 30 modules to the drupal itself.

Perhaps I could set up some screen sharing, and someone could walk me through it in irc/msn/aim?

[-=VcL.Rajinn]

Well, if the site you're using to host it on has phpmyadmin, just login to it and download the database.

[2020]

this was looking promising...

[Concord]

I still have the database and everything, I started working on the new theme, I sent the database to Rajinn, I don't know if the work was dropped or he will surprise us with something gorgeous.