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. =)

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.