PGD news postings

[AthenaOfDelphi]

You you may or may not have seen on the front page of the site, yes I have put up a Donate button for giving donations to the PGD Website Staff for use in improving the community through various means. (And for some reason my web browser couldn't load the PGD site after making a couple of edits. Irony it seems. )

I'd post the button but thats what got me into trouble in the first place and well the site just won't let me.

Did the button use PHP? Because last night, the server went into meltdown for some reason. I saw it once, then when I refreshed the page a short while later your article wouldn't display. Upon investigating the error it transpired there was a problem in one of the scripts relating to the handling of templates. After that the server went into super slowmo mode and wouldn't respond to anything, not even cPanel requests.

Send me the code for the button and I'll see if I can get the button working directly on the site.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

WILL... did you send an announcement email last night? If so, I'm wondering whether it was that that killed the server.

[Pyrogine]

TBH, I don't feel much going through yet another website migration.

Putting news on is not all that much work. Unfortunately its not possible to select a topic in the forum and just 'promote' it to a news item, but a simple copy/paste with some minor moderation does the trick well.

IMO, what we need is a few people willing to help out in this particular area.

What I'm currently doing on my site is using Simple Portal (http://simpleportal.net) which has a feature that will allow you to select a board of which it's topics will appear in the portal. For PGD you can setup a moderated board for user submitted news and once its approved it will show up on the front page, ala GameDev.net and DevMaster.net.

All the MODs used on the site are free with the exception of:[*]SMF Store ($89US)[*]Newsletter Pro ($45)[*]Twitter and Facebook Publisher copyright removal ($15US)[*]MF Advanced Topic Prefix ($10US)

I too had lots of trouble with customized themes and eventually gave up and just starting using the new curve default theme (SMF 2.0).

[dazappa]

As for the site:
I would heavily suggest going with something like what pyrogine suggested. There are mods out there that take messages from a board and post it on the front page. If not, message me and I'll code something up for you. SMF has this handy little file "SSI.php" which allows you to access a ton of the boards features easily enough.

I don't think the forum software should change. It's pointless. All you'd be doing is paying for something you already have, and looking for mods that have the functionality you already have.

As for content:
While my knowledge in certain areas is rather limited, I'd love to contribute tutorials, but I cannot contribute video tutorials any longer as CamStudio seems to hate Vista. (Worked perfectly under XP). I could still make some basic intro to Lazarus/FPC tutorials, and I could write up some stuff on Andorra 2D.

I'm not sure how well having an announcements board would work though. People might spam random stuff. Possibly you could add permissions to users to use the board once they've proven they're trustworthy? Until then, copy/move posts into the board.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

The point is... vB4 provides all the features we need... things like member blogs, the ability to turn a post into an article etc. The ability for you guys to write content without having to use wiki markup or another set of login credentials. Having started porting my forums to it, I can safely say it kicks the ass of what we have now. It's a beast yes, with a lot of options... it has it's gnarly side which can be frustrating trying to find the option you want in the admin panel, but it does everything we want to do straight out of the box... no modules, no customisation... nothing... just install, setup your content and import the existing forums (it should be that easy). And for users... it's a pretty nice experience.

This makes it very appealing from an admin perspective because you don't have to worry about compatibility between modules during an upgrade. This has presented us with problems in the past and has resulted in upgrades not being done (the old boards got hacked because of this very issue), so anything we can do to prevent this situation occurring again is a bonus.

We (the admins) are discussing what we're going to do about this now. vB4 is in the running in a big way because of what it provides as standard.

[JSoftware]

This is the same forum as Lazarus uses, isn't it? Doesn't it already have the functionality? There posts in the announcment subforum will be on the frontpage

[WILL]

WILL... did you send an announcement email last night? If so, I'm wondering whether it was that that killed the server.

Sorry yes I sent and announcement email (via the forums), BUT that was after the server freaked out or melted down. I was switching modes to try to get the HTML in for the button. I think I even switched to php mode shortly after yup, it died. Doesn't speak very well of the news posting software does it?

But I'm quite sure it was the news/article posting feature of the site that killed the server last night. Very frustrating...

I'll PM you the button code so you can put the actual button up. Thanks.

[dazappa]

The point is... vB4 provides all the features we need... things like member blogs, the ability to turn a post into an article etc. The ability for you guys to write content without having to use wiki markup or another set of login credentials. Having started porting my forums to it, I can safely say it kicks the ass of what we have now. It's a beast yes, with a lot of options... it has it's gnarly side which can be frustrating trying to find the option you want in the admin panel, but it does everything we want to do straight out of the box... no modules, no customisation... nothing... just install, setup your content and import the existing forums (it should be that easy). And for users... it's a pretty nice experience.

This makes it very appealing from an admin perspective because you don't have to worry about compatibility between modules during an upgrade. This has presented us with problems in the past and has resulted in upgrades not being done (the old boards got hacked because of this very issue), so anything we can do to prevent this situation occurring again is a bonus.

We (the admins) are discussing what we're going to do about this now. vB4 is in the running in a big way because of what it provides as standard.

If you guys really want to go with a paid forum, then yes, I would suggest going with vB and nothing else. (I didn't know it had that functionality right out of the box either)