New Website Development

[Rorschach]

Greetings! I've been a fan of Erfworld for several years, checking in regularly and reading (and rereading) the comic. When I read the proposals on the new site design I started contributing a little and making a few recommendations. After talking with people in IRC I made a bid on the project and Rob awarded me the project. My job is to make things work, and then someone else will make them pretty. I might do a bit of minor rearranging and image uploads, but I'm not going to have any sexy screenshots or mockups to show everyone.

This is a huge project of course. The direction that we discussed was using Drupal modules (see drupal.org) instead of hand writing everything. The joy of hand written code is that it does exactly what you want it to do. The pain of hand written code is support, upgrades, updates, security, etc. From a beta project to a mature project takes several months after almost everything works. Part of the reason for using Drupal is that it appears we can do everything we want to do. If any custom code needs to be written, I can do that too. The only code that I'm concerned about in terms of complexity is making "reddit style" functionality via up and down voting, which changes the display. That is actually doable *somewhat* in Drupal, using custom Views and a VotingAPI module. Yes, Drupal really can do it all.

If you are interested in what is being built, the website design spec is going to be followed nearly verbatim. I itemized the list of features, and found the necessary modules. Now it is a matter of testing all the modules, fixing or working around the bugs (I have a few but I'll patch Drupal if necessary), customization, writing PHP snippets to integrate it all together and making the user experience fairly seamless. We'll be keeping these PHPBB3 forums, and then integrate Drupal with them. The Wiki is something I'd prefer to replace, but that's a long hard discussion with the Wiki admin and finding out what we gain (no migration) and what we lose (no seamless integration) by keeping the existing Wiki.

Rob also has some cool ideas for making new things, and I'll try to accomplish as many of them as I can in a reasonable time frame. (Link from comic to wiki, more reddit functionality, community driven content, Hamstard integration, etc)

If you have any questions let me know, I'll try to answer them daily.

[Erf and Terf]

Thank you. I was wondering about this. It is very cool of you to provide the design specs as well.

[Dark Arbiter]

Thanks Rorschach! Really pumped to see (or not, as the case may be) what you have in store for us. This is a huge undertaking and we all appreciate it a ton.

[Boondoggle]

Please strongly consider implementing https://browserid.org/ for single sign-on. It's an awesome spec and needs all the support it can get to get a foothold. And it's super easy to implement. (No, I don't work for Mozilla, but I was shown it by someone who does.)

[Rorschach]

We have OpenID, Google+ login, and Facebook Connect login via a module (as in, already installed but not configured). If BrowserID is supported by drupal modules then I'm very willing to include it as well. If not, it goes into a later phase and if flagged as a must have feature then we'll do it in a separate budget. I put in a really low bid, relying on drupal modules, and expecting to write less code but able to write just about any code as necessary.

[Mrtyuh]

Thanks for your hard work, Rorschach. I can't wait to see what you can do.

[balder]

Actually, Rorschach had some major life crises come up and had to bow out of the project. We have a designer and an architect, but no lead programmer right now. Two steps forward, one step back...

[Mrtyuh]

I'm really sorry to hear that. Rorschach, if you read this, I wish you the best with your "major life crises," whatever they may be. I hope everything works out for the best.

Thanks for keeping us in the loop, Rob. "The best laid plans of mice and men," right?

[Balerion]

Are you actively looking for a new programmer? My life is currently far too hectic to help out, but I can check with friends to see if they were interested if there is a place I can refer them to.