Feb 12 2008
It’s Coming Along
Exactly one year ago I began working on another fan site. I hadn’t worked on one since RCT Station. I don’t know why, but I miss that sort of work. I seem to get some sort of sick, twisted sense of pleasure hand-coding pages, especially once the design is done and it just comes down to the content. Content was something that RCT Station had loads of, as Ogre and Railwolf both remember. All of Ogresnet was like that.
But when you make a mistake or decide to change anything major, it can be a pain in the ass to fix. I can use the simple “replace” tool in my text editor to replace a short string of text, but anything major requires a fully manual approach.
Since I’ve been away from this project for so long, I’m still familiarizing myself with everything. I had it so that everything used templates. That’s all well and good until you forget which CSS goes to what and what it all means. It’s just going to take me a little while to get back into the swing of things.
I wish I had some idea of when I’ll be able to officially launch this “new” site. I haven’t made any progress in at least six months, but I’m finally getting back to work on it. I’m not a fan of launching a site before it’s truly ready (all of the bugs are worked out). It will be a few more months at least, but I also need to work on buying, installing, and customizing vBulletin. That’s something I’m not looking forward to. I’m not much of a designer, so I will probably purchase a design and hire someone to do a custom logo/header graphic. But that’s months away, so I don’t have to worry about all of that yet.
I use templates in a MySQL database that have tags that get replaced with the content by PHP’s str_replace function. I don’t need to touch my content files at all if I decide to change something in the site design.
I wouldn’t use vBulletin even if it were free. There’s some good free forum software out now.
What’s wrong with vbulletin? I am also considering phpBB now that they released v3, but I really don’t follow forum software development like I used to.
I don’t like it, and Ogre didn’t seem too happy with it either.
On the front end, it’s fine, but the administration lacks some useful features than even the original Invision Board had way back when. Plus, they make a lot of unnecessary changes to the database tables and other things just to show that they’ve been working on it. This breaks other scripts you may have that rely upon its database.
I’m not too impressed with Invision Power Board since version 2.0+ either, to be honest. It seems that all the companies are adding tons of fluff to their scripts to make them seem worth the price. They could make a “Lite” version for $50 or so with just the basics, but they won’t.
phpBB3 looks interesting. There’s also: http://www.simplemachines.org