Website

[M]

New IG Wabsort

Harro. I've been working on a new front page for the site for the last couple of weeks. Here's a massive post about it ^-^

New Features

New features

• Match challenge form
  People can now challenge us to a match without registering for the forum using this form. The results of the form are sent to every member currently belonging to the Emperor and Duke member-groups as a forum PM. Uses reCAPTCHA to stop Gavin receiving spambot match requests about viagra and golf clubs. The PMs sent to the leaders will be sent from the account of the person who filled in the form if they're logged in, or "Guest" if not.
• Match result management
  The Emperor and Dukes have access to a page in which they can add and delete results from matches. The list of matches on the right sidebar is ordered by the date on which the match took place. The clan's tag is an abbreviation so hovering your mouse over it will provide the clan's full name, and clicking it links to a view of results specific to that clan. Clicking a match's score will show details of that match -- the outcome, scoreboard thumbnails (which can be clicked for a full view in a little modal dialog thingy), and whatever other details need to be added like what the weather was like that day.
• Server stats - provided by Vincenzo's Admin Tools
  Vincenzo's Admin Tools makes the server send details of player numbers and map etc to the 22nd.eu server every minute. His interface is horrible so I made a thing that brings the data to our server rather than accessing it directly there, which unfortunately means a whole other nameserver resolution needs to happen in the loading of the page, rather than afterwards. At the moment it's cached to reduce delay but at the cost of more regular updates. There is a (somewhat unintended) way to send the data to our server instead of theirs but then I either need to reverse engineer the script that processes the data or get Vincenzo to give me his source. Knowing Vincenzo neither of those options is easy.
  The tracking is also wholly based on the name of the server rather than a more useful identifier, so I've included a form with which the Emperor and Dukes can change the name of the servers shown -- ie, if we start running the second server as siege, it can be changed to "IG_SiegeServer" for the tracking to work properly.
• User controls
  If you're logged in it shows you how many new PMs you have as a link to your inbox and gives a link to the forum's unread posts view. If you're not logged in it gives you a form link to log in and a link to register.
• Clan roster
  The clan roster is generated from the forum's usergroups. So when, for example, Brego is demoted to Lapdog, the roster will automatically reflect that. Because rank changes aren't especially frequent, the roster table is cached on a long timeout (two weeks) -- a link to regenerate the cache is shown at the top of the page for the Emperor and Dukes, so they can click that after they've changed one or more player's ranks to instantly update it.
  The rank images link to a small lightbox window, or a normal page if javascript is disabled, giving details about that rank's role and responsibilities. The XFire icon is a link which lets you add that person to your XFire if you click it. Steam doesn't offer this functionality, or rather it does but only if you have access to the person's Steam Community ID, which I don't. Instead, it just shows the Steam name you can add if you hover your cursor over it.
  A limitation of grabbing member names and ranks from the forum's database is that people who use a different name on the forums than in-game (looking at you Deathstar) and people who can't spell their names correctly (looking at you "Gulatr") are shown with their forum names. This could be feasibly fixed by using the in-game name profile field but unfortunately not everyone fills it in. It also means that clan members who never bothered to register for the forum aren't listed at all, but I don't see that as a problem...
• New layout
  Hopefully not so ugly you're ashamed to link potential recruits to it like the old one. Reams of medieval text sandwich overly-long walls of our own text, such as the constitution and history ;D ~self satire~

Features TODO

Features TODO

• Roster
     
  • Rank modal dialog details from database -- currently static.
  • Separate into military and civilian branches
  • Member counts for ranks and branches
  • Forum PM links on roster for logged in visitors, maybe Taleworlds profile links
  • More intelligent guesswork of in game names based on the multiple fields
  • Medals display when medals are implemented.
  • Player/character biography pages, editable by the player in question
   
• History
     
  • Book viewing stylee
  • Management page
• Forum
     
  • Reskin a little to match new design. Mainly just the banner text and background, leave actual forum layout as it is
  • Make some proper way to have normal login form on front page (SMF session redirect code is actually a turd)
   
• Challenge
     
  • Calendar for date selection, drop down menu for timezones, GMT conversion
   
• Results
     
  • Edit functionality
  • Don't display tags in brackets if the tag is the same as the clan name, eg einherjar/shieldings and WARBAND
  • Further fields for match results:
           
    • Factions played
    • Maps played
    • Team sizes
    • Opponent country (displayed by a flag; including an unknown flag and an EU-flag)
    • Organiser and commander of the match
    • A way to add screen-shots from a web-address instead of uploading them
         
  • Public (moderated?) comments for match results. Low priority
   
• Videos
     
  • Currently static, needs management page
   
• Server stats
  
  • Migrate strings.txt destination to our server and make script to receive and parse them
  • Ajax refreshing (ie periodic update without refreshing page in browser)
• Maintenance
  
  • Automatic periodic database/files backup
  • Permanent search-able (by admins) database of player IDs paired with what names they've joined IG servers with
  • Custom error pages
• Blog style news update page
• Match post and signup
• Constitution
  
  • Reformat, make glossary into lightbox links

Browsers tested

Browsers tested

• Opera 9, 10.7, 11 internal
• MSIE 6, 8
• Chrome 7
• Firefox 3.6, 4 beta

http://guardofistiniar.org/

Note: The user message thing and permissions might not work until you logout on the forums and log back in

[Beardface]

Nice new layout with a bunch of new functions! A nice style i can use for future videos 

[Nublet]

Me like! 

Nice work M!

[SCGavin]

One word: Awesome.

Great work. It looks fantastic and seems really useful in terms of accessibility and dynamic information display. I really love the looks and the features.

Match result management
Some features that could be nice:
- Organiser and commander of the match
- Team sizes
- Opponent country (displayed by a flag; including an unknown flag and an EU-flag)
- A way to add screen-shots from a web-address instead of uploading them

And the planned features also sound good:
# Public (moderated?) comments for match results. Not sure if necessary.
# Multiple categories/taxonomy of match results, for example for normal matches and ENPL matches
# Proper fields for factions and maps played in match results

Clan roster
Separating the member-list into Military and Civilian would be nice. If it isn't to much work a counter for all members, members of each branch or even each rank would also be useful.

Permanent search-able (by admins) database of player IDs
I think this would be really, really useful and as long as only admins can view it, I see no problems (they can view the logs anyway).


When trying to submit a challenge, I get this error:

Warning: require_once(forum/Sources/Subs-Post.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/guardofi/public_html/testing/challenge.php  on line 28

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'forum/Sources/Subs-Post.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/guardofi/public_html/testing/challenge.php on line 28

E: Seeing that you already made a list of sources, I think it would be nice to link to them at the bottom of the site. Also maybe make the stuff about Vincenzos tools a bit smaller. Or add the link and put a note of Vinces tool there!

[M]

Glad you like it Gavin :} I'll add your features to the todo thingy

Warning: require_once(forum/Sources/Subs-Post.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/guardofi/public_html/testing/challenge.php  on line 28

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'forum/Sources/Subs-Post.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/guardofi/public_html/testing/challenge.php on line 28

Was expecting something like this, I didn't test that form after I migrated the site to the IG server because I didn't want to spam you with tests I'll fix it shortly

E: Seeing that you already made a list of sources, I think it would be nice to link to them at the bottom of the site. Also maybe make the stuff about Vincenzos tools a bit smaller. Or add the link and put a note of Vinces tool there!

Good idea, I'll make a little page of basically that information with a "copyright information" link on where vincenzo's thing is atm

[Kuzune]

Really awesome!

'Nuff said.

[SCGavin]

Ah, what I forgot. Regarding the constitution and it's wall-of-textiness: I/we have to go through it again anyway.
Some things should be removed, others could be added and again other things are unclear. Also the organisation of the information isn't the best. The glossary seems like a "put it here if you know no other place" thing and it would be good to get a good structure for the constitution, where it is clear where which topic can be found. Maybe a table of contents would also be useful. (Idea pops up: The windows you made for the descriptions of the ranks - when you click on an image in the roster -: that could be useful for explaining stuff like Nobility and so on. That way the constitution wouldn't seem as long.)

[Fiddler]

Really awesome!

'Nuff said.

Indeed.

[SCGavin]

Some brainstorming:

A short teaser that is displayed before the actual website is shown could be interesting. Probably some warband-footages and some effects. It shouldn't be to long, maybe 30 to 60 seconds. Also with a link to skip the intro. If we ever use something like this, it would be low priority, but it could add quite some "Wow"-effect to the site.

[Beardface]

Some brainstorming:

A short teaser that is displayed before the actual website is shown could be interesting. Probably some warband-footages and some effects. It shouldn't be to long, maybe 30 to 60 seconds. Also with a link to skip the intro. If we ever use something like this, it would be low priority, but it could add quite some "Wow"-effect to the site.

Well a teaser like that is kind of site-heavy and well 30 to 60 seconds isn't exactly ''short'' for such a thing people usually lose interest around 15-20. A lot of people really dislike a site before a site so to say, a site where you have to click ''Enter website'' and where there's a delay to something they actually want. I think this is great as it is.

[evacuee]

Some brainstorming:

A short teaser that is displayed before the actual website is shown could be interesting. Probably some warband-footages and some effects. It shouldn't be to long, maybe 30 to 60 seconds. Also with a link to skip the intro. If we ever use something like this, it would be low priority, but it could add quite some "Wow"-effect to the site.

I'm against this idea. These are things that feel cool when you're thinking of them, but in reality, they're quite annoying, even if there is a button to skip it. If the only purpose is to impress, we could just have it embedded on the first page, so that those who want to watch something like this, will be able to.

[Chikun]

kewll!

[evacuee]

Oh, forgot to say that it looks really good!

[Demonhun]

Really nice M About the popup videos yes they are quite annoying, they should be auto started on the homepage in a small window and then the user can click on it and it will take him to the bigger version. Most game websites use this method.

Also the steam click to add thing isnt working. The xfire one is working.

[Lugh]

M:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/VLnWf1sQkjY" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/VLnWf1sQkjY</a>

It looks brilliant! Very professional . The roster is excellent and the clicky contacts are incredibly useful. I have a suggestion for the clicky character names that redirect to forum profiles. Would it be possible for each member to instead have her or his own bio page? And the clicky links to this bio page? The page could incorporate the roleplay element of the clan, such as character background stories.


I agree with Zan and evacuee's comments about the teaser. Personally, I don't really like websites with teaser intro's.

The forum definitely needs reskinning to match the site.

As for the public comments about matches: it's a pretty good idea. Would definitely make it easier for other clans to interact without them having to go through the whole forum registration process.