3. News and Messages

[*DAMN Mauti]

Hi guys,

first a short addition to the yesterday finished clan module:

At the moment you can only send membership invitations to the user. Users can't send applications. Although this function has already been added to the member management panel I would like to add more settings for the clan. So they can decide to make an open signup or resistrict membership requests to certain games, etc... In the end I would like to have a kind of match making site for the user to see all clans that are looking for another member. This functionality will be added once everything else works.

News and Messages

Today I gonna start to work on the news and messages module. As the name implies it's all about posting news. I also want to use it to post rules. So I can dynamically show the current game settings on the ranking pages, etc...

Although it is one of the smaller components of the framework it is a very important one. Communication among users and the staff needs to be painless. Users should be motivated to post with each other. Clans should easily be able to drop private news and information to their members.

I have a lot of other ideas so the basic news module could grow up to a code monster. As a consequence I have splitted work into two phases:

1. Basic news functionality for the *DBL main page + rules
2. Clan and user centric communication features

The first one is mandatory while the second one might follow after launch.

Once the news module is done there is only one thing to do: the ranking and clanbattle module.

As usual more news as they come,

Mauti

[*DAMN Mauti]

Just wanted to post that I come along very well. All the basics were done after a few hours and its safe too. I'm currently working on some design decisions, but phase 1 should be finished today or tomorrow. So I can start with final part.

[BFG]

Good work mate. Any possibility of adding an option of users submitting general news that we can then approve and post/ edit / decline? The main *DAMN news section tended to have a few dust balls rolling past and its nice to keep people informed with interesting stuff going on out and about!!

[*DAMN Mauti]

I had such an idea in mind for the redo of the "main" *DAMN site, but it could also be a good idea for the *DBL news, so user can inform others about any game updates, etc. directly.

My ideas about the approval system was that there are two criteria to get news feeds published on the main *DBL/*DAMN news feed. Normal users(or users with at least x posts) can suggest an news item and if it reaches a critical limit it gets publishes or it gets directly approved by an admin. All user submitted entries can be viewed on a "page 2" news site.

As it is now only the *DBL Staff can post news as it was in the *DBL 1.0.

But I think it is a good idea and should be added, but probably after launch as it isn't a requirement for the *DBL core system.

BYe,

Mauti

[*DAMN Mauti]

I was away for two days, but the news and rule module is finished now.

Here is a small feature list:

• post *DBL news with locked and sticky options
• post *DBL rules with an own set of options like version numbering and setting tagging
• comments for news and rules. Each rule is like an own topic so everyone can post their questions directly to the related rule topic
• WYSIWYG Message submitions - no more BBCode tags 
• Finally news and rules(!) searching
• Auto linkify
• and a few other features

The *DBL rule overview

One rule category. You can also view all rules of a game, or just enter "" as searchterm to view all rules

Beside that there are still some missing features I want to add after launch:

.) Topic notification and "New Posts" tagging
.) smilies and quoting
.) advanced version control for rules
.) showing the last 5 posts on the reply page


Only one module left. More about that in another post soon,

Mauti