Wiki-front page redesign, ideas/suggestions please

Post by **VilleK** » Fri Oct 02, 2009 2:25 pm

Hi guys,

The last few days I got some ideas on how to make the main ZGE page (at www.zgameeditor.org) more "living" and interesting. Here is what I have in mind:

- Replace the existing text (move this to a new About-topic?) with a few short paragraphs explaining what ZGE is.

- A couple of cool screen shots (randomly selected for each visit)

- The main part of the screen is a "Latest news"-section. This will display all the latest activity around ZGE, including "Code commits" (read rss-feed from ZGE on Google code), "Forum threads" (read rss-feed from this forum using a phpBB-plugin), and "Wiki-changes" (rss from the wiki itself).

What do you think? Can you think of any problems with the above proposal, or do you have any more ideas on how to make the page interesting? Let's discuss! I have absolutely zero experience designing community web-pages so I need all the help I can get

/V

kattle87 · Post by **kattle87** » Fri Oct 02, 2009 11:13 pm

we should get a exe demo in the front page, too.
Something something "I made this in 5 hours with ZGE" stuff... It might get people attention. Ideas about what kind of demo we might pull off?

diki · Post by **diki** » Fri Oct 02, 2009 11:49 pm

the current mainpage is like a table of contents / overview over the wiki. moving that somewhere else and instead focussing on a short & snappy description including a link to the download and documentation sounds like a good idea.

screenshots (maybe even a gallery plugin?) are always nice! they should link to the screenshots/videos page, where every shot has a caption of the feature it demos.

the feeds are a good idea, but they should be second to (e.g. not visually dominate over) the general introduction, so they don't overwhelm newcomers.

and i second kattle87, a 'latest projects'-feed (with short description & forum links) might be cool, too. it would also go nice as a stand-alone page (videos!)!

y offs et · Post by **y offs et** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 12:21 am

Well, I kinda like the current page because of its functionality. After all, the users are program creators, rather than gamers. I do agree, it is a little drab.

What I hate about some web pages is how long some of them take to load, with all the fluff some put on them. I would suggest that users interested in 64kb. would not usually have high speed internet. Videos on the front page take time to load, and once viewed, become annoying on every future page load.

Sorry, as all I have is cautions.

Post by **VilleK** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 11:40 am

"Latest projects" with download-links is a good idea. I agree that the page needs to load fast but a couple of rss-feeds shouldn't be that slow.

I'm going to try this pmwiki-plugin for displaying rss-feeds to see if it does the trick:

http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/RssFeedDisplay

There is also an example on how to integrate a phpBB-forum with the wiki:

http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PhpBB2Integration

And here is a plugin to rss-enable phpBB2-forums:

http://www.phpbb.com/mods/db/index.php? ... ib_id=1253

I will try some of the above plugins to publish a new test-page on a alternate url and post here soon.

jph_wacheski · Post by **jph_wacheski** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 1:15 pm

Sounds like a good idea,. one of my fav. sites that does this sorta' thing well is;

http://buzzmachines.com

If you are using BUZZ you are always interested in finding more machines to generate and effect sounds,. and here they are, nicely organized by release date and easy to get for yourself to try.

I think your rss ideas will mostly cover this,. but it could perhaps be even more usefull to organize part of the page into sections like the BUZZ site.,
we talked about it befor, but perhaps now is the time to start a Library forum, and begin posting usefull componet structures,. maybe even create a 'Content/Assets' sub-section and then create Library, bitmap, mesh, shader, sound, AI, etc. subsections,. to allow people to post samples and usefull starting places for creating such content in the ZGE. (perhaps this is an expantion to Tips'N'Tricks?) this would make it easy to organise/find basic usefull structures,. . just thinking out loud as per useual,.

Post by **VilleK** » Tue Oct 06, 2009 4:23 pm

Yes, the buzz-page is very nice.

The plugins worked without any problems so the rss-feeds are now at the bottom on the main page: http://www.zgameeditor.org/ . The feeds are cached and updated every two hours at the moment. I haven't noticed any slowdown in loading the page.

Hopefully I can make it look nicer later on and perhaps divide the page into separate sections. At this moment I'm just learning the technology to get basic functionality up and running.

Next I will try this gallery-plugin and see if it can generate a screenshot-page with thumbnails and random images on the main page:

http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/WikiGallery

Post by **Kjell** » Tue Oct 06, 2009 4:45 pm

Hej Ville,

Can you publish the feed as RSS just like for the Wiki? Then people can subscribe and use their favorite feed reader as well

* Perhaps you can make phpBB trigger generating the feed on activity instead of a fixed interval?

+ Pushing the feed out using pubsubhubbub or RSS Cloud would be icing on the cake

Thanks ~
K

Post by **VilleK** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 10:51 am

Good suggestions Kjell.

The pbpBB-plugin does not cache it's output so I need to do the caching on the wiki-side.

I just added a rss to the main page that publish the "Releases"-part of this forum.

And I will take a look at those links you mention, I'm not familiar with them. It's hard to keep up with all the new web-technologies and products out there

.

Post by **Kjell** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 11:35 am

Hej Ville,

Generating the feed on activity is probably something you'd have to hack in when the phpBB plugin doesn't support it :S Concerning the feed itself .. isn't the pmWiki plugin you're using for the "Latest Forum Posts" pulling it's data from a RSS document? Just like "Latest Code Commits" is located at http://code.google.com/feeds/p/zgameedi ... nges/basic

And never mind "push internet" for now .. it's way too geeky still

K

Post by **VilleK** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 12:09 pm

The pmwiki-plugin can display rss-feeds in several formats from any url and cache them on the web-server to avoid unnecessary traffic.
So I use this plugin to display feeds from both Google Code and phpBB.

You can see for yourself on the latest changes of the main page how the mark-up is done:

http://www.zgameeditor.org/index.php/Ma ... ction=diff

The phbBB plugin can generate feeds for latest posts on the whole forum, or on a single forum, or in a single thread. The feed displayed on ZGE-page is all the latests posts. The feed published from the ZGE-page is the "Releases" forum only. The forum plugin never stores it's output, instead it makes a database query each time to generate the resulting rss, so we don't want too much traffic to it because it could slow down the forum.

Post by **Kjell** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 12:20 pm

Ah,

I see .. so you probably don't want people to subscribe to rss.php then

Although .. since phpBB uses a SQL back-end it shouldn't drain your server any more then browsing the forum.

* By the way, the PubDate specification that the plugin uses is obsolete.

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi? ... %2Frss.php

K

Post by **VilleK** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 4:29 pm

Did some more work on the wiki today:

- added dates to the rss-feeds and displayed them in html-tables
- moved text from first page to new documentation contents page
- moved videos from screenshots-page to new videos-page
- added yoffsets video to the video-page

I'm not used to working on web-pages so every little change takes ages to implement. At least I'm learning useful stuff about php and pmwiki as I go along

.

Post by **VilleK** » Fri Feb 19, 2010 7:19 am

There are still some things I would like to fix on the wiki. For instance I would like the screenshots on the index page to be randomly picked from a folder. Can anyone recommend a php-script that do this?

Post by **Kjell** » Fri Feb 19, 2010 12:10 pm

Hej Ville,

Here you go ..

Code: Select all

<?php

$path = 'your_path';
$images = array();
$scan = scandir($path);

for($i=0; $i<sizeof($scan); ++$i)
{
	$split = preg_split('/[.]/',$scan[$i]);
	if(preg_match('(gif|jpeg|jpg)',$split[sizeof($split)-1]))array_push($images,$scan[$i]);
}

$key = mt_rand(0,sizeof($images)-1);
echo '<img src="'.$path.$images[$key].'" />';

?>

By the way, I had a look at the PmWiki source and documents a while ago, and it would be more of a hassle to inject a full fledged user system + game upload / profile etc. into PmWiki opposed to starting from scratch ..

K

Edit : Added $path variable