Eclipse
Member since: 2013So, I wanted to keep guild members kind of "in the know" as to how things are coming along with the site upgrade.
I actually spent quite a bit of time on it since the post to the front page yesterday, and let me say I am quite pleased, however I have a few questions.
1.) Do you all even care about the active forum posts on the front page? I don't use it, and I'm wondering if I'm alone here. At the moment I'm working to make it more blog/image/news centric, and trying to get as many images organized onto it in as fashionable a way as possible. Does that seem like a move in the right direction compared with how you all use it?
2.) As I mentioned above I'm doing a lot more with the blogs. If you don't blog, please let me know why, if you do, let me know what would make it better.
3.) I'm toying with the idea of letting guild members "feature" their own art on their own profile pages. So you could pick a single piece you've done and it would be more prominent on your profile. good idea? bad?
4.) ALA DA I was also thinking about letting guildies "favorite" other artist's work, and have it show on their own profile page. Good idea? bad?
I'm actually not even sure I can do 3/4 w/o some serious coding on my part, but I'd love a little feedback here.
As for where the upgrade is. I've actually done a COMPLETE upgrade locally for myself, and am basically just doing a ton of styling work at this point. I'm VERY pleased with how quickly the upgrade went. The styling work I'm doing will all be saved when I'm done and that + a few more settings and some data migration and I should be ready to apply it on the real site. Realize this may take a couple of weeks still, but it IS moving along. :-D
Lemme know what you all think!
Eclipse
This sounds awesome, Eclipse!
As for your questions:
1.) I don't know about everyone else, but I definitely use the active forum posting links on the front page - that's how I got to this post!
2.) No comment.
3.) Not a bad idea, if you want to go to the trouble.
4.) Bear in mind this is just my opinion, but I think this is a very bad idea, and very counter to the idea of SWAG. SWAG is an RPG-art resource, and not a place for artists to showcase, necessarily. Artists can and do showcase their skills, and there's nothing wrong with that, but the focus of the site should be having quality Star Wars art for RPG available for those who need it. I think we should do more in the way of sorting our art and making it easier to find what people are looking for - that's what SWAG is for.
Boshuda
Yeah,
In regards to sorting the art better, it's gonna happen I can promise! :-) I'm just wondering if you as users would like to keep track of other art w/o having to go find it again all the time.
Eclipse
I can see a marrying of both what Asok is saying and Eclipse is saying. Why not have a favoring system that basically says, pics I would like to or have used in my game. Asok, you can't deny that you remembered a pic that you wanted to use in a game that you had forgotten how to find. I'm just not sure the system has to be public?
To your other questions.
1) To be honest I have used this feature once or twice. Never been something that I HAD to have.
2) I'm fine with the current blog style.
3) Doesn't really feel necessary, at least to me, especially since you can see most of my gallery on one page. :P
Thank you for letting us play in your sand box!
P.S. Not sure if you've done anything with the search engine yet, but that is one of the main fixes I'd love to see!
Improvements for the search engine ON the site is in the cards, but not for this upgrade. (But like I said, it's in the cards)
Thanks for the other feedback, taking this all into consideration!
Eclipse
Actually, Eclipse, I thought of something for the blogs. It would be nice if the artist's name appeared next to the blog title, so we would know who had made a new blog, at a glance on the front page. That would be cool.
Boshuda
You can consider that one as definitely happening. Currently in my test site I have 10 blogs showing. The most recent is quite large, with a large version of the most recent image uploaded to that blog. The next 2 blogs occupy about half as much space again the same sort of layout, just smaller, and then the final 7 are underneath those 3, again a very similar layout.
All of them will have the date/time they were last updated along with the author's name.
Eclipse
I'd like to see the blogs used for more traditional blogging, rather than just WIP stuff. As it stands most things that would make good blog posts end up as forum topics instead. I think this is inherent to Drupal as it blurs those lines somewhat. Since discussion takes place mostly in the forum, that is where people are likely to post their musings.
Other notes
Generally speaking I'd like it if we could use more html in our posts. I understand the desire to keep it really minimal, especially in the forums but maybe opening it up for guild members in the blogs and on our profile pages would be cool.
Yeah, we'll probably see some sort of wysiwyg editor in the next version, what form that will take, I'm still debating some.
As for the "bookmarking". Currently it's not private, but it's on it own tab, so you'd need to go looking for it. But as was mentioned in the news post about this, that's really great for non-guild members who want to track their fulfilled requests and so on. It could be images, blogs, forums posts, lots of stuff potentially.
Eclipse
I'm rethinking the "favorite"-tabbing feature... used for keeping track of pending requests and things of that nature would be great and helpful. I'd be wary of fostering competition in the community, though, which is something I've never wanted. I guess I'm sort of torn, but it's starting to seem like a good idea.
Boshuda
Well chances are it wouldn't even show an image, it'd just be a link to the image page (again so you can get back to it quickly).
Eclipse
I had a quick idea, Eclipse. Maybe it would be cool if we developed the "featured art" feature a little more. Maybe we could make it more regular, like every week (or once a month if we don't produce good art fast enough!), and let all the submissions from that span be judged by the artists (maybe the whole community!) and voted on. I think it'd be a good way to get us all more involved again with the site. Just a thought.
Boshuda
I had another quick idea, Eclipse. You know what would be nice? To see the artist's name at the top of the picture instead of the bottom. That way I know immediately who drew it, before I scroll all the way down. That would be awesome, I think.
Boshuda