New Site

Posted on Mon May 31st, 2010 @ 11:33pm by Captain Benjamin Byrne

Alright guys, hopefully you'll all soon be logged onto this new site of ours, with its snazzy new skin and design :D

First, a few quick words on the Nova system. It is the next advancement of SMS, and as such comes with many new features. Firstly, there is the new dashboard (top right), which gives you ease of access to all things written - posts, jps, pms... it even tells you when you have any thing saved, and whether it has any new tags on it for you.

Nova also comes with the possibility of commenting on people's posts, news items, and wiki pages (yes, we have an in-built wiki now, in place of the old database. I'm still working on transferring the content over). I highly encourage you to make use of this new system; if you read a post and thought it was really good, leave a comment! It is always nice to get some feedback on things you write.

Also with posts, you will see the 'tags' field has moved down to below where you write your post. The Tags area has a new purpose with Nova; it helps the inbuilt search function. Whenever you write a post, log or news item, make sure to fill the tags out with information relevant to that post. If it is a battle post, put 'battle' in there. If it is a post involving the science department, put 'science' there. Separate each term you put in the tags field with a comma.

Nova also gives you the chance to upload your character images to the site, rather than having to link from elsewhere. You all need to make sure to upload your primary character image through this function, and ensure that it is this image that is associated with your biography. For reasons I will explain below, it is important your character image is on the site's domain name, and it is important you only have one image for the moment.


And finally, something that is completely unique to our little website here is the skin I have designed for it. I am still very much an amateur when it comes to modifying Nova, but this skin - aside from having a unique look - has a unique feature to it. To the left of all non-wiki and non-admin pages, you will see some user data and data about your primary character (or if you are not logged in, you'll see a guest image of tribbles). This is something I spent some time on coding, and I am quite proud with how it turned out. Unfortunately in its current state, it will only show your image if you only have one, and it will only show it if your image is in the site's upload directory. Otherwise, you'll be missing out on the chance to look at your character's ugly mug- err.. pretty faces every time you navigate around the site :D


Thanks all, and remember if you haven't already to read the private news item I sent out on our last site before trying to log in on this new on - if you try too many times with the wrong password, you'll be locked out for a period of time.


Regards,
The Cap'n

Category: Website Update
Tags: nova, site, tribbles, new