OrangeSwarm

Today i have been figuring out what category’s i would like OrangeSwarm to have. I think it’s important to have a good category tree because this is the backbone of your entire website, certainly when you have allot of different articles. When you don’t have a good category tree your articles will get mixed up eventually, it also has to be easy to use to users can find the right category for their article to go in, and they wont just post it in something like miscellaneous. That just ain’t good for anyone,  and certainly not for us.

I came up with the following category tree to start with (i will most likely come up with different category’s and might even remove some later, as its a work in progress).

• Games
  • Reviews – Reviews of games will go in here
  • Setting up – This will include downloading and installation guides
  • Walkthroughs – Walkthroughs for games
• Media
  • Movies – Everything related to movies
  • Music – Everything related to music
• News
  • News Flash – All the news concerning OrangeSwarm will go in here
  • Downloading News – All news that concern downloading, like court decisions
• Software
  • Windows – all software running on windows
  • Mac – all software running on mac
  • Linux – all software running on linux, this includes getting software to work on wine.

Also I have been thinking about what we need. So far I came up with the following:

• A Forum
• Visitor Statistics – update: we will be using google analytics, fixed that.
• A Download area
• Reply on comments – update: fixed, just needed a plugin
• when submitting it says “comment is submitting, please wait a comment” that should be changed to “submitting, please wait a moment”
• Recode the post php so a default image is picked when no image is added, chryseus idea: add generic default images, depending on category the post is submitted to.

Again I will certainly come up with more, and of course again if you know something we really should implement, please let us know! we need your input.

Update (20:21 GMT) : Alright, so I made some minor changes to the theme which I think were really necessary, like the theme name image at the right bottom, and as a suggestion from chryseus I merged the 2 sidebars into one, witch give it more space and we can place something nice in there than. For now I placed the last 7 comments in there, which I think is fine until we find something better.

Oh also I just came up with the idea to never ever add a chatbox to this website, ain’t that a great idea? I think it is. Why? Because I think its good for nothing, chatting can be done true other ways, and if its something you really wanna share you can also just post that in the forum (soon to come when that god damn bbpress installer.php doesn’t show a blank page… i really have to get a fix for that). I’m thinking about adding a “spam” part to the forum, for everyone’s chatting needs, that works fine as well i think!

One final thing for now, I really need people to add some nice content. if your willing to help please do because I need it for testing purposes. If you cant seem to figure out how to add articles ask here in a comment and I will get back to you as soon as possible (or someone Else can help you).

Ow just when i submitted this i figured id go add some content, went to orangeswarm.com and i realised we don’t have a “Server” category, I’m thinking about adding this to the main category Games, and than adding a subcategory called “Dedicated Servers”. Also, with every post you “need” a image atm.  I’m thinking about recoding it so there is a default image when you dont add a image, i guess thats a good idea? Altough people should just add images to their post’s.