SWA Online v.T2… almost done
Wow! I haven’t posted anything here for days. Or been on twitter. And I’ve only been on Facebook to play Mafia Wars. The new SWA Online goes live in a couple of days so I’ve been making the last minute changes, adjustments and such.
And it’s been a headache. I wanted to change the software completely and provide something that was more admin user friendly as well as something that non-expert admins could handle and something that would contribute somethnig back to the user base.
So I broke it down into sections I’d need on the front end… SWA, obviously, Source, After Hours and Fan Access. Right, easy.
Not really. I have a collection of CMS’s that just don’t seem user firnedly in the slightest and the best ones had the biggest learning curve. As I have to teach operators how to use it, and I have very little patience, I went for something that a lot of people find easy to use and that my feedback circle said was the best one for the job: WordPress.
Unfortunately, WordPress isn’t the best thing for the job. But, WordPress MU is.
With MU I can create an SWA base site, sub-blogs for Source with their own user style and do the same for other sub-sites. With the right plugins I have a events manager for both sides of the promotional coin and a few other handy plugins ready to roll to enhance the use of the site.
Fan Access & Forums were moved over to a Fan Access Community sub-blog with a slightly tweaked base template so I could have the FA side-menu thrown in there without using a category manager that would befuddle newbie admins and hey! It’s done.
NextGen gallery will handle the photos, TubePress the videos… basically the same as it does on this site.
The main advantage of using MU is that I can have separate eblogs running separate sites – but with the same userbase so logins are easily handled. I hide the backend from anyone but admins… and bada-bing, bada-boom. A multi-layered website. The only complex part is the community/Fan Access aspect and with moving it into it’s own blog… it’s simplified.
So yeah, the new SWA site is a set of custom templates, one user base, community with Fan Access and forum, social networking integration, simpler admin features such as an events calendar to handle upcoming show previews, photo galleries, video galleries and some more…
…it’s been slightly stressful and has taken up the bulk of my time in the past few weeks from the simple development and outline on good old fashioned paper to refining the code and putting the finishing touches, getting the info up… but it’ll hopefully be wonderful.
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