Publishing Again

2008 Aug 01

Well, we're back up and running. I had some weird issues with a particular image, but after some research and work, all appears to be well and functioning again (YAY!). With all of that said I'm going to take this moment talk a bit about SWAG's future.

SWAG runs on the Content Management System called Drupal. Drupal is a fantastic set of tools that helps me manage SWAG with very little community help (i.e. Currently Hisham and Evan Black help out in the forums, but Drupal does virtually all of the heavy lifting as far as the images go). This is great, but Drupal has recently released a newer version of their software, and while we can't upgrade to the newest version quite yet, that moment is soon approaching, and once it arrives I hope to begin SWAG's transition.

This will be a very large transition (not as large as the transition from pmachine) but some technologies were used that experience has taught me would have been better left alone. With that in mind it does appear that I have an upgrade path from where we are to where we want to be, so we'll have to execute on that and see how it goes. If all goes well with it, we will reap MANY benefits. The benefits on my mind at the moment are:

  1. Fewer images on the server w/o reducing our library size
  2. Better file organization (as in all of stirzy's images would be in a "stirzy" folder on the server... this may seem insignificant, but it has greater ramifications for the server at large)
  3. Better "Featured Image(s)" handling. Currently this is totally hacked together, and I'll have the ability to REALLY make this shine in the next version.

There are many other things in the pipe too... for example, I'm seriously considering giving guild members the ability to publish content w/o approval. This will of course be on a trial basis and people who abuse this privilege (by posting things they shouldn't) will be disciplined accordingly, but our community is VERY fine in these regards, and I really have no worries. After significantly more than I year of actually RUNNING SWAG, I've had no real issues, and I'm not sure I see the point in holding onto this particular "power" in the next version. I think the biggest worry in this regard is that a member might unknowingly publish artwork that could get us in trouble with LFL... a problem we don't want, but we're pretty good at self-policing, so we may at least give it a try.

With all of that said, I wanted to at least give the community a nice big update on SWAG in general. I expect these changes will probably help SWAG grow even more, and when that happens we truly will need to consider moving to our OWN server, but again an issue to cross when we get there.

I expect I'll probably refine the existing design for this next version, I was never 100% happy with it.

Eclipse

dredwulf60

Once again, I'd like to say thanks so much for all your hard work and dedication. This site means so much to me, and frankly without your efforts it wouldn't be what it is.

Lord Crumb

You do a great job keeping this site up and running. I am always glad to visit and view the artwork the guild members pull on the site. Keep up the great work and look forward to the upgrades.

-LC

Stirzy

May I just echo the above sentiments and say thankyou for all your hard work.

P.S. I hope my last image wasn't the straw that broke the camels back!

Xanamiar

I have to agree with all the others sentiments on this, you are doing a great job, we hope you can keep it up :)

Thanks for all the great artwork, and the ability to request even more.

Eclipse

Stirzy,

No, no back breaking going on, for some reason I just couldn't get it to do it's thing. I copied all of it and reuploaded it and gave it a few hours, and then tried again, and wallah, seems to have worked. I think there was just a caching problem after trying to create the derivative images and not being able to. I don't anticipate any future problems (until we run out of space again).

I appreciate all the appreciation I get for doing this. I do this for you all, really and truly. Thanks for all the support.

Eclipse