Introducing: Mania’s Forums
The secret project that I’ve alluded to over the past few days is finally finished and ready for users! Or at least ready for users … I don’t think anything I do is ever actually finished. *sigh* Perfectionism + laziness at its worst. At any rate … here it is.
What is it? Forums! Or as I call it, a companion community for the readers of Petopia and Mania’s Arcania. That’s companion as in ‘alongside of’ and also companion as in ‘pet’. Yup — it’s a hunter pet-centric forum community.
What is it not? A rabbit! (Can you tell I’m a little punchy today? I had to get up way too early and I spent the afternoon looking for a house to rent and the evening with my husband’s family. Ugh.)
But more to the point, it’s not a replacement for any of the other fine forums that already serve the hunter community like TKA Something, BRK’s forums, or the Hunting Lodge forums. The idea is not to compete with established communities, but to give the commenters who hang out here making this blog so rich and interesting a place to communicate without having to wait for me to get my act together all the time.
Yes, that’s right — I started a forum so I won’t feel quite so guilty when I forget to post. *grin*
Anyway, there’s a handy link in the menu bar at the top of the blog so feel free to head over and take a look. (I’ll be putting a link on Petopia soon as well.) You’ll need to register if you want to post, but you can poke around with no commitment. The forums are functional, although they are missing a good number of bells and whistles yet, but I’ll be adding features as we go. There’s not much there yet — just some Posting Guidelines and such, plus a thread to introduce yourself if you’re so inclined — but that means that there is plenty of space for starting a discussion! Hopefully the forum descriptions are clear enough.
My current plan is to let the forums and the blog cross-fertilize: active comment threads here will spawn active post threads there — post threads that won’t slip off the front page day by day! — and I’ll be looking to pull the most interesting discussion from the forums back here as blog posts. But we’ll see how this works out.
Feedback is, as always, much appreciated. Comment, post, or e-mail — your choice!
[Optional technical notes:
Those of you who know something about forums may wonder why it took me much of the week to get this set up. There is plenty of full-featured, easy-to-install, free forum software out there, after all.
Unfortunately, I'm rather picky about theming -- having developed this Mazzranache-themed look for the blog, I wasn't willing to let it go. And once I get my head around a way of doing things I tend to stick with it. So I decided to use bbPress, the forum software by the same people who make WordPress, because I already understood the underlying organizational principles.
But bbPress is still in beta. Well, they released the first alpha build of their eventual first release candidate this week, but after spending a day with it I decided that I was better of with the last stable version of the beta.
And being in beta, there are some features that aren't quite there yet, or are still hard-coded into the core files when they should be exposed for theming, or completely undocumented. Most of the code, in fact, is completely undocumented. So it was a lot of work -- and a lot of fun -- to get the forums where I wanted them. There are still a bunch of features left to integrate but I think I got the most important functionality hammered out ... I guess we'll see, eh?]
38 Comments
Good stuff Mania. I’ll be there.
Ditto
WOOT!!!!!!
Aww Nightranger, that was my reaction! >_<
Awesome news Mania, I hope to be an avid contributor. :o)
It looks great Mania – much thanks for the persistence to do this.
*Chuckles* Some where else for me to run my mouth….. thank you, Mania, I am sure all your fans and readers appreciate this, myself included.
Yay!
Hoorah for forums, Mania, you continue to amaze us all, I’m an avid reader of Petopia, your Arcania, and ofc warcraft mounts too, but I had actually been thinking recently that i should pull my finger out and contribute more to the community, and hopefully, the forums will be the perfect way for me to do so :) great work :)
‘Java
Huzzah!
Good job Mania
Awesome Mania!!! Man, imagine all the neat stuff that’ll be on the forums soon!
Great stuff Mania… I’ve been looking for a forum button for some time :)
I like that your forums is integrated into your layout, not like a lot of the other forums. I signed up. :)
nice ^^
Only thing is, the background image on this site and that scrolls really slowly and makes my computer make a funny noise, when I come here I normally disable images just to make it smooth again…
But it does look very pretty!
It looks fantastic, Mania! I love how it integrates with your blog. I’m going to sign up for sure. :)
*Gasp* Forums!!!! <3
Yet another thing to cut into my play time lol :)
WOOT a place for me to say I got Araga nah nah nah nahnah nah! lol jk
But but…
ARGH
Now I gotta read both TKASomething Forums AND your Forums..
*grumbles*
hehe
I’m sorry, Kilraq. I don’t want you to feel obligated! :>
Good to see another WoW site using BBPress. I think that makes 2 of us now! Anyone else? I can relate to the perfectionism: I spent a week styling and writing extra code for El’s forums over the new year period, and there are still things I’d like to do (not least email notification of posts, since almost nobody uses RSS to track forum posts). Should probably start creating a pool of WoW-related plugins.
Is the forum-blog integration set up? I logged in on the forum, but the account didn’t seem to carry across.
El! I has no idea you used bbPress. That’s really cool!
At this point I have to admit that about half the stuff I am doing is not a plugin per se, but instead hacks to the core codebase and/or functions stuffed into my template. It’s embarrassing, but I’m spending some time today learning about pluginization and cleaning it up (as I try to get TinyMCE integrated).
There’s no forum-blog integration yet, mostly because I had already upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.6 and bbPress 0.9.0.2 is using different cookies than WP 2.6 apparently. And since I haven’t required registration on the blog for a very long time I figured this was fine for now. I’ll be jumping to bbP 1.0 as soon as its stable, though, and then we should get full integration.
(By the way, nice article about exploration!)
I got an issue! I can’t join! The section for email is to short to allow my full email to go in :(
By the way, will you be adding a name that pet section? Then we can post our own pets for names and have others give suggestions and be less work on you :3
I managed to avoid altering any of the trunk code, but there are a few places where the styles are more-or-less pointing at code that replaces the trunk, which is kind of messy. Most bespoke functions can be applied using add_filter(), but every so often you’ll want to add a filter that there isn’t a hook for yet.
Best advice on integration is to try it on a private copy first. It’s rather too easy to accidentally remove all the admin permissions and lock yourself out.
Congrats Mania. I’m sure that if you put even 1/2 the effort into your forum that you do with your other endeavors it will be a great success.
tried a quick topic post in tips, but was given the bb error that ‘subject’ was not found. odd, used the create a new topic button.
will muck about with it – in the meantime it was just a generic request for a thread based on hunter macro’s
Kai: I can make that a bit longer. How many characters is your full e-mail?
And for now you are more than welcome to post Name That pet requests in the Stories & Screenshots forum. I figured I’d wait and see if the forum is a complete flop before I decide to make any changes there.
shibumi: I wondered what was going on there. According to the admin dashboard, you moderated your own post … three times! I’ll see if I can fix it. :>
El: *nod* I have a local copy of each of my sites that I experiment on before I push stuff live. Admittedly, the testing period is sometimes in the range of 5 minutes, but I *do* test. *grin*
I’m the only person I know a link on my desktop to my home machine’s Apache httpd.conf file so I can swap what folder localhost points to in seconds if I need to debug something.
Ahha! I found the problem with the missing posts. I saved one copy of yours, shibumi, but if anyone else has lost anything important let me know and I’ll try to find it.
…would you believe 34 characters? ahe.. ^^; I am not joking either…
webmistress@crystalwingdesigns.com
Long time reader, first time poster. Glad to see your secret project is taking flight. I dropped in on your Intro post on the forums. Was fun writing out all my 70s =P Look forward to being part of a great hunter community
Kai: You should be good to go now. Let me know if it still gives you trouble.
Looks great so far. I’ll spend some more time there later in the day when I’m not so distracted by work.
I do have one question. I suspect I’m missing some very obvious link or whatever, but how does one set one’s avatar on the forums? Or is that even available yet?
Right now the forums only know how to deal with gravatars, and it figures those out automatically from your e-mail address.
Thanks Mania!
/note to self: Big Sister is Watching
The Hunting Lodge » Mania Now Has Forums!!! - August 19th, 2008 @ 7:41 pm UTC
[...] this weekend (yes, I’m slow I know) Mania announced that her secret project was actually a forum to help promote discussions and further even more pet [...]
I registered for the forums but haven’t gotten the e-mail with my password. It’s been a few days now & nothing.
Sarai: Looks like there was a typo in your e-mail address. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to change the e-mail address yet (I know, I’m a dunce) so for the moment I just deleted your account so you can remake it. I apologize that I can’t just fix it.
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