Website
Introduction
This article collects ideas for the planned redesign of the fifengine.de website.
Contents |
Spirit of the project
First and foremost we should agree on what kind of spirit the new website should try to transport. Flexibility and transparency (meaning good documentation for the engine as well as a transparent and honest project management philosophy) are the two most important terms IMO.
Transparency could be expressed by using a light colour scheme for the new website. Any ideas how we could express the flexibility of the engine? One possible option would be to use thumbnails of different FIFE-based games for the banner graphic (e.g. island_demo, Zero, KoN).
Consistent design
A consistent design amongst the majority of the FIFE sites would be good. A nice example how this could be done is shown at the Wesnoth website: http://wesnoth.org/
The Wesnoth site features a kind of Wesnoth banner at the top and a navigation bar with the most important links under it. A similar design with a FIFE banner and a vertical navigation bar sounds useful for the FIFE website as well.
Exceptions to the common design
Some of the FIFE-sites might not share the common design of the other sites for a number of reasons:
- The functionality is primarily meant for developers, e.g. a fancy banner might be out of place for the doxygen and epydoc documentation.
- We don't have full access to all services we're offering. E.g. we can't customize the design of trac (besides being able to replace the logo graphic).
Sites that shouldn't feature the new common design:
- Doxygen documentation
- Epydoc documentation
- Channel log interface
- All trac services (changelog, blog, roadmap, SVN browser, ticket tracker)
The new vertical navigation bar should contain the 5-7 most important links. Feedback appreciated.
Proposal for nagivation bar links
- Home
- Forums
- Planet
- Screenshots
- Downloads
- Game creation
- Engine development
Required functionality
The following functionality would be useful for the new FIFE website.
Home
The home site is the site that a visitor sees when he visits the fifengine.de top level domain. The home site should contain:
- Release announcements. Normal visitors are often just interested in the most important news to it makes sense to separate release announcements and regular developer blog postings.
- Summarized "What is FIFE" statement and link to the full statement that is featured at the wiki.
- Community spotlight in a separate box. Might not be the perfect place for the community spotlight but giving it an own place in the nagivation bar doens't sounds reasonable either. Ideas where the community spotlight should be placed are highly appreciated.
- perhaps a quick access to latest official release for various platforms. See the sand-coloured area of http://wesnoth.org/
Forums
Current funtionality in place is fine.
Planet
Planet FIFE is a site where all kind of FIFE-related RSS feeds are aggregated to monitor project-related changes. Possible feed candidates are:
- SVN commits
- New topics / replies at the FIFE forums
- New / updated / closed trac tickets
- Developer blog postings
- Wiki changelog
- Zero-Projekt news feed
- KoN news feed
Screenshots
Current mediawiki-based solution works fine for me. Should look even better with new wiki theme that features the common FIFE design. Qubodup proposed to use the glamdrol theme and customize it for FIFE: http://wiki.fifengine.de/Screenshots?useskin=glamdrol
- Instead of having all the screenshots on one long page, they should be grouped according to the release version / year / etc. and put on different pages.(Lamoot) They could also be grouped according to which project they belong. An example of this is Ogre3d's gallery. http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option=com_gallery&Itemid=75
Downloads
Latest official releases should be featured at the home site. Download site should contain all downloads. Current mediawiki-based solution should work fine especially with glamdrol theme in place.
Game creation
Game creation section of the wiki with all kind of guides and tutorials for people who consider to create a FIFE-based game.
Engine development
Engine development and project development tools links could be merged into one article and shown at this site. Mediawiki-based.
Blog
A developer blog should provide the following functionality:
- Developers can write blog postings
- Blog layout should be customizable to follow the common design of the other pages (currently not possible with our hosted trac)
- Users and other developers can comment on blog posting. (not possible with the current trac-based solution in place either)
Other
We'll need a place for the link to cvsdude.com as we're hosted for free by them. I would prefer to have the link somewhere at the header near the logo so it can be seen on every subpage.
Considered software solutions
Home
Proposals appreciated.
Forums
Stick to the current SMF-based solution but adjust the theme to feature the new common design.
Planet
Either the original Python-based Planet or Drupal. I've already set up a drupal-based planet FIFE site for testing purposes: http://planet.fifengine.de
MuteX has now set up a cronjob to update the RSS feeds every 10-15 minutes :-)
Screenshots
Mediawiki with customized theme.
Downloads
Mediawiki with customized theme.
Game creation
Mediawiki with customized theme.
Engine development
Mediawiki with customized theme.
Blog
Proposals appreciated. I would prefer moving away from the trac blog solution and go for something that integrates with our forums so users and other developers could comment on blog postings. Some options are:
SEO for website
As written by Joshdan at the forums: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?topic=82.0
It was discussed on the forums that it would help to have some SEO on the homepage so that people who are looking for us or just a 2d engine can find us.
Keywords
- FIFE
- 2d game engine
- isometric
- open source
(and combinations thereof)
Techniques
- Change title, description, and keywords tags to include keywords
- Replace the word fifengine with FIFE almost everywhere (fifengine is both more unique and less searched for)
- Avoid coined/mashed words like FIFEwiki, etc.
- Remove links to unrelated sites, especially things in the footers. If links are required by terms of use, use nofollow
- Link back to the homepage from child sites; ideally on every page, but certainly on the landing pages. Links should include keywords.
- Link Exchange -- just listing this one to say I think it's not worth it. Page Rank is basically a zero-sum game, so an exchange can't make both site's scores go up.
New domain?
How about registering either either fifengine.net or fifengine.org? The current domain gives the impression that this would be a German project though the development team is pretty much international. A .net or .org domain would be 14 Euro per year so I could definately pay for it.
FIFE Logo
With the planned new FIFE theme, we think it's neccesary the project gets a proper logo. The logo should be recognizable, unique and visually appealing and most of all convey the spirit and aim of the project. For the moment the current team members are trying to design it, but if we are unable to achieve a proper result we could ask for help artist of various open source communities to help us.
List of communities
- GIMP http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/
- Inkscape http://www.inkscapeforum.com/
- Tango Desktop Project http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project
- Blender 3D http://blenderartists.org/forum/
New logo draft
Created by a friend of Lamoot:
Wordpress prefix hack
The wordpress syndication plugin treats all news posts as if they come from an RSS source. As this is not the case for FIFE articles, we just get an empty prefix. This hack fixes that issue. We should get rid of this if there are a cleaner way.
OPEN FILE
/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
SEARCH FOR
get_syndication_source()
ADD
if ($ret == "") : $ret = "FIFE"; endif;
RIGHT BEFORE
return $ret;
