Your ideas about the future of Apolyton

[Robert]

Hello all,

Tonight Jeroen and me are going to team up to think about Apolyton and it's future.
Please share your ideas about the future of Apolyton here.
If you have very specific ideas, please share them.
If you know cool or very good software templates we can use / buy, please place it here.
If you want to contribute, please tell us, and how you want to / can contribute.
If you have technical skills or knowledge, programming abilities, please say so.
If you have other skills and you want to help, please let us know.

If you prefer sending us a pm then that's perfectly possible of course.
This is not about the forums or forum moderation but about current or future civilization content.

Ideas about the front-page are very welcome. Perhaps you can create a photoshop screenshot to show what you think, or post a link to a site that has something that inspires you and should inspire us.

Please try to think outside the box.
Links to php software that we may use / buy of the rack and can easily be implemented are very good as well.

If you have more vague ideas or visions, post them!
We can of course not honour all ideas and offerings, nor can we respond quickly to all of them.
It's all new to us as well, we are sure that you understand.

Thanks a lot for all ideas and help!

Jeroen and Robert

[Jon Miller]

We have a number of graphical people here, see if you can make a contest or something to redesign the front page. Would be fun and create interest?

No reason for you to do it yourself unless that is where your skills lie or no one else will help.

JM

[self biased]

what could we do with a wiki structure? we've thrown up one at another site i go to, strictly for entertainment purposes, but the theory is still sound. maybe throw up a link to active topics on the main page?

[Martin Gühmann]

Well the forum upgrade was supposed to come with a new front page, it had vestigial left side menu and the news in the center. Unfortunately, it isn't finished.

For the games, there was a drupal wikibock approach. We used to try to cover a game, but we failed to finish the forum upgrade so we dropped.

In fact, I could also edit something there, even if I wasn't in charge of that game, so I liked it very much. We could use it and expand it to all the other games we cover. But let the members of Apolyton copy and paste the content from the old pages. For the old section like CTP2 you would have to do it anyway, since the CTP2 section is just a bunch of html/php pages.

So first, I would check what we have now, especially the stuff we have behind the scenes and check, whether we can use it.

If you have technical skills or knowledge, programming abilities, please say so.
If you want to contribute, please tell us, and how you want to / can contribute.
If you have technical skills or knowledge, programming abilities, please say so.

Since I am programming on the CTP2 Source Code project I have programming skills, obviously. Probably, I can also do some web programming even if my only experience in it is with putting and modifying some PHP and HTML documents. Probably I could fix some things that are wrong with our new Apolyton download database, well more than fixing the entries themselves.

For the forum, I would like to have a news block under the who's online block and also a block that is telling what are the latest files in our download database.

-Martin

[Asher]

I have database and programming abilities, professional web app development using PHP.

Ten years ago I did website development for a Civilization site...not sure if that's relevant.

[self biased]

i like the idea about the download block, but we should also have a 'most popular' downloads as well.

edit: i also did some data entry for markos/dan back in the day. i'm not sure if that helps, but i'll knock up a front page mock up.

[Martin Gühmann]

i like the idea about the download block, but we should also have a 'most popular' downloads as well.

You are right, I just forgot to put it onto my list.

-Martin

[flash9286]

You need to fix the front page. Personally, I think a blog type front page news style would be best. With links to the more specific parts of the site on the edge or something.

[Grandpa Troll]

I have database and programming abilities, professional web app development using PHP.

Ten years ago I did website development for a Civilization site...not sure if that's relevant.

I am glad to see him anaswer the call Robert, I dont think you can go wrong

Grandpa Troll

[self biased]

i know i'm going to catch hell from asher for this, but is there any way we could mimic and/or modify the Nine Inch Nails to suit our needs? any new content that's generated can be displayed on the front page.

[Jeroen Schweitzer]

Monday

Hi All,

Robert and me just finished our brainstorm. We read all your posts in this thread and we seem to be coming to the same conclusion you all do.

The first and foremost thing that needs fixing is the front page. We want to create a page were you can find a summary of what is going on, both in Civland as well as on Apolyton. We want to give it a facelift, add some navigation that stays consistent throughout the entire site. We are thinking latest files, latest posts, latest polls and a revamped news section.

Also, a clean up of the advertising philosophy (why is the most visually present thing on that page not ours?!?) is in the making.

We have some ideas for new functionality, like for instance an Ask Apolyton feature and game wiki's that we are playing with at the moment.

We have a LOT of code and platforms to learn to find our way in, so we will be focusing on finishing the facelift and the new front page for starters.

Thank you all for offering help as you did earlier, it is appreciated! We are planning on chopping the new functions into small projects for which we will be contacting you as they develop.

For starters, I would like to ask someone with graphic web and flash experience (yes, I know that is almost cursing, but I promise we will keep the site usable without ) to help me get the visual ideas to tie it all together worked into reality. If anyone is interested in working with me on this, please PM me.

One thing Robert and I have been considering is that the site at the moment is too fragmented across a variety of games. Although we promise not to close anything down without there being a serious alternative, we do want to make Apolyton about Civ again and, in that light, we will be steering the front page design in that direction.

I want to close by saying that we are thrilled about taking on this project and hope that we can meet your expectations.

[self biased]

in all seriousness, with all the crap that gets thrown asher's way, he's still here and willing to help out. y'all would be foolish not to even consider using him.

[TCO]

If Asher and Siro will collaborate, please have them redo the graphics interface. There was some sort of bizarre attachment from someone (Solver?) to the current interface and it makes no sense on the site and is an example of mulishness.

[self biased]

i second this.

[Asher]

Hi All,

Robert and me just finished our brainstorm. We read all your posts in this thread and we seem to be coming to the same conclusion you all do.

The first and foremost thing that needs fixing is the front page. We want to create a page were you can find a summary of what is going on, both in Civland as well as on Apolyton. We want to give it a facelift, add some navigation that stays consistent throughout the entire site. We are thinking latest files, latest posts, latest polls and a revamped news section.

Also, a clean up of the advertising philosophy (why is the most visually present thing on that page not ours?!?) is in the making.

We have some ideas for new functionality, like for instance an Ask Apolyton feature and game wiki's that we are playing with at the moment.

We have a LOT of code and platforms to learn to find our way in, so we will be focusing on finishing the facelift and the new front page for starters.

Thank you all for offering help as you did earlier, it is appreciated! We are planning on chopping the new functions into small projects for which we will be contacting you as they develop.

For starters, I would like to ask someone with graphic web and flash experience (yes, I know that is almost cursing, but I promise we will keep the site usable without ) to help me get the visual ideas to tie it all together worked into reality. If anyone is interested in working with me on this, please PM me.

One thing Robert and I have been considering is that the site at the moment is too fragmented across a variety of games. Although we promise not to close anything down without there being a serious alternative, we do want to make Apolyton about Civ again and, in that light, we will be steering the front page design in that direction.

I want to close by saying that we are thrilled about taking on this project and hope that we can meet your expectations.

Jeroen,

I admit to being wary at first, but this seems to be a very promising start. A breath of fresh air.

I retract anything negative I've said about either you or Mr Plomp in the meantime, and I'd like to help with anything you need.