News @ Gameslate

Update: Nope, I'm second-guessing this again.

. . .

Following my ponderings and expelling of frustrations last week, I'm bitting the bullet and moving ahead with Drupal 5, something that in hindsight I should have done months ago. Ahhh well, it's easy to look back isn't it. Now it'll feel good to get back to the grindstone.

My priority will be on moving the main Gameslate community features to Drupal over the coming weeks. I'd like to get the guild features in especially, since Age of Conan will be launching on May 20th. I'll be experimenting with different configurations with the Organic Groups module until then.

Gates Motel will come afterwards, I'm not feeling super rushed on it and would rather spend the time to get it running nice and stable like it once was. I realize after all this time that Gates isn't likely to gather the large community that it once enjoyed, aside from the time spent in a half-assed state, casual gaming has plenty of other popular avenues these days. Still, long live old BBS ports!

In the long run, it would be nice if Gameslate can carve out a niche for itself within game-centric websites. I don't necessarily want to compete with the big media offerings, the portal communities or the recent game-related blogs, but I would like to provide a cozy place for gaming peeps to gather around.

Now I just need to juggle this with other stuff that I've got going on. =)

After months of waiting for Drupal 6 to get up to speed, I'm getting sick of waiting.

The worst part is seeing Views 2 and other key supporting modules flounder while the core Drupal team rushes on to Drupal 7 before 6 is even usable.

Slow down, seriously. This is one recent adopter who's disappointed with the headlong pace and the near abandonment of what's just come out the door. I realize it's exciting and probably profitable to you, but when the codebase is a moving target and the next version significantly cuts into current development to the point of current = incomplete... well that seems an obvious Catch-22 problem to me.

Freeze 7 and finish up 6. You called it complete, but it isn't. You cannot complete 7 anyway since these are modules planned for the 7 core.

I'm not a site-designing company, so I'm not profiting from the steep learning curves, accelerated development and problematic upgrade paths. Overall I think the software is well designed, but the priorities of the companies that fuel most of the development are beginning to sit poorly with me.

Edit: I'm going to clarify here, because at least one person misunderstood the paragraph above. I'm not accusing anyone of being money-grubbing greed mongers. It's just that money and business tend to act like glue in regards to priorities such as these and that means the situation may be stuck this way./Edit

Granted, some of the forward-thinking features brought me to Drupal in the first place, but I'd just like a stable and complete platform to work with. It puts me at unease to realize that's two versions before what's being developed now.

This is me grumbling a little before I just make do with Drupal 5. I'm already past my original deadlines and Drupal 6 looks like it will still be stalled for awhile.

For the core oldschool Gameslaters (oh geez, do I want to make that a word? *shutters*), the main reason to peek in here is to answer: When will the new Gates Motel be ready?

It's a high priority. But it's the roof of a house, I need to make the foundation first before I can even start on the walls. And since this is the web and looks are important, the paint kinda holds up the walls too.

For another analogy, I don't want to spend much time swimming upstream. Some of the easier stuff is going to get done first, I'll use that stuff to familiarize myself with Drupal. I also need to check a few things off my maintenance list for sanity.

Enough analogies and explanations, here's the order of stuff the way I expect it:

1. User Profiles and Logins - It's mostly done and will be complete long before you see it. Thank goodness Drupal does most of the login / registration hard work for me.
2. Blogs - I'm converting some blogs over early because it's the best way for me to learn theme skinning for Drupal.
3. Forums - A central and complete forum solution is long overdue for my sites. Unfortunately, forums aren't Drupal's strong point, so I'm going to be spending a bit of time on this part.
4. Gates Motel - Here's where it is. =) Custom coded of course, but I'll be hooking into Drupal's login system.
5. Other game servers - I haven't really posted much about it, but Gameslate does host a Subspace server sporting custom game code (still in development), plus a server for The Ship. I'll post more about those soon, but the point is I want to integrate the game servers with websites in various ways. Status, stats, that sort of thing.
6. User extensions to Gameslate - Drupal has some nifty community features that I plan to explore.
7. Miscellaneous sites & blogs - Some of these will get done sooner when I need something simpler to work on than the hardcore code, but most will come after everything else is done. A few of the outdated sites will simply get retired.

There you go. I can't promise that I'll strictly follow that ToDo list, but that's the general idea.

I would have started this blog sooner, in fact I had several false starts, but I needed the basics covered first. Namely, I needed to pick a CMS (Content Management System).

Normally for blogs, I use Wordpress. I adore Wordpress, it does one thing and it does it very well. But that's exactly a bit of my problem, each of my websites does one thing and I want to squish 'em all together at the very least under a combined login system. And not every site is a blog. Some have forums, games, etc.. A lot of my older sites were custom-coded from the ground up, including Gameslate.

My initial thought was to bridge my sites, basically leave them as-is, but replace their standard logins with a centralized one. After a few attempts though, I've learned just how messy that could get. Wordpress, MyBB, and my oldschool procedural code were never meant to get along. Besides, it's already a pain to work with totally different code bases, so how much does easing just the logins solve for me?

My new approach was find a one-CMS-to-rule-them-all solution, although expecting a CMS that could do everything was unreasonable, so I decided on a few core things that I absolutely needed:

1. Logins / Registrations that rock - Priority #1, I'm sick of tedious logins and remembering a bunch of different passwords, especially for my own sites dammit.
2. (near) Direct HTML / XHTML + CSS Theme skinning - One of the things I love about Wordpress, additionally I could hope for the ability to cleanly throw my own PHP code right into the themes. MyBB had me frustrated with its truly awful database-driven theme system.
3. I need to be able to hook in my own PHP code, the way I want to - Whether it be via plugins / modules that match the CMS, or flat out hard-code where I want to put it. Getting the job done is absolutely paramount, so I don't want to wrestle with the CMS, I want it to step aside or embrace as I need it to.

It goes without saying that I needed something open-source, I'm simply not interested in proprietary software when it's something I intend to extend / kludge with my own hackneyed code.

The short answer is: I've settled on Drupal.

I'm pretty happy with it so far and I think my relationship with this CMS will be a long one. I've committed myself to it now and the rest is about squishing whatever square bits into round holes to get it where I want it to be. It's not perfect, but as I said, I haven't been expecting perfection and most of the other CMSs I've tried have been a far cry short on the few main features I really need to build my foundation on.

Now I need to dig in and get some things done.

I'm supposed to set the tone here right? I dunno, this is probably going to be a matter-of-factly kinda blog where I just stream out my thoughts as I go, because that's what meets my purpose here.

As the "mission statement" tagline says above, this is a true blog in the sense of a web-log (hypenated for emphasis). In fact, it's even about webstuff, although specifically ~my~ webstuff.

Most of it is Gameslate stuff, but what is Gameslate anyway? In some ways, it's just been a convenient domain for me. I've thrown all sorts of miscellaneous websites up as subdomains of Gameslate, not just because I'm a cheap bastard, but I've always adored the subdomain mechanic. In fact, I think it's sorely underutilized...

<digression rant> When I first bumped into the ole' internets I loved that domains were descriptive, they were truly addresses that indicated locale. An early email was something like rog@outb.wimsey.van.bc.ca, but it didn't take long for it to get shortened and then BOOM .com came along and somehow everyone thought .com meant Internet. /boggled. </digression rant>

Okay, that's setting the tone, pretty much get wordy about a topic and then wander off on a strong opinion. Sounds like me unedited, yep.

My Gameslate subdomains have become unwieldy. Not only do my users have different logins to slog through for each site, but I have to work in the muck of a bunch of different systems as well. So it's time for convergence, which is easily the biggest undertaking I've had in awhile.