Pete Posted April 7, 2012 Share Posted April 7, 2012 Well after 3 months' worth of evenings (and various iterations over the last 11 years) it's finally in a state that I'm happy to show it to you in. You'll need a modern browser to view the site, as it looks a little off in IE8 and will almost certainly break in IE7 and older - I have the somewhat enviable luxury though of being able to ignore older browsers completely since the site's visitors overwhelmingly use new browser versions. Without further ado, I present StrategyCore I'll post a case study at some point, but here's a brief intro and a few of the highlights to get you started. My first website - X-COM.co.uk - was built in 2001. By 2003 it became apparent that there weren't going to be any more games in the X-COM series (although any fans of the series will know that there are now two more in development some 11 years later!) so it branched out into other strategy games and was re-labelled as StrategyCore - covering core games for strategy gamers. It's not a huge site by any means - a few hundred pages and a hundred thousand posts on the forums (not a great deal in 10 years ), and has been growing at a modest pace, but when I get time away from other website work I like to try new things with it and use it as a place to test some neat ideas that I can use in other projects as well. Several PW modules came about as a result of this - the SitemapXML, SocialTwitterUpdate and Maintenance Mode to name a few, as well as others I'm still polishing up the code on. Before this turns into a case study (it's getting late here in England) I'll post that list of (vaguely) interesting features: Forum integration - news articles on the site generate a topic in the forum software and if you're logged in there's a full commenting interface with various buttons (quote, edit, delete etc) as well as pagination, not that there are any articles with enough comments for that to show yet! Logins aren't integrated yet, but I'm working on it. Random header images and taglines The Dark and Light links next to the search box at the upper right - click on them I prefer the dark one personally. This will eventually be re-worked into a "Settings" button where you can set preferences for which header images to show, set your newsletter subscsription, choose which site colour to have by default etc, but for now on the site and in the forums these just change the colour) A nice bookcase - not a particularly original feature on websites by now, but still looks neat Some neat categorisation, archiving and pagination for articles Game playthroughs (After Action Reports) tagged on the forums are automatically added to a specific part of the Articles section (hidden by default of course) - saves us some work adding them to the list manually from now on My first foray into responsive web design. As such, I kept it basic, catering only to monitors (to far along with development to be thinking about tablets etc unfortunately) but having a set of minimum and maximum widths that should work on 1024x768 and 1920x1080 monitors equally well. A nifty bit that caused me a slightt headache is that when you view the homepage and make the browser window narrower, the right-hand block drops neatly below the "Featured" block at a certain resolution to give it more space to display longer article titles. There are plenty of other bits and pieces, but they're hard to spot without me pointing them out and a lot of it is behind the scenes stuff which I'll cover later on in a case study. I think that's the point though - if you get it right with web development then things should look simple and people won't know what went into making it look the way it does. There's still quite a to-do list - meta data is missing at present, I need to tidy up some hideously complex and disorganised CSS (should have used LESS, and the mess is a result of adding bits here and there as and when I get time to work on the site rather than categorising styles properly - not the norm, honest!) and minor styling fixes on the forums, but I'm happy with it. Anyway, these are a few random late-night ramblings and as mentioned a case study outlining all of the useful details will follow at a later date P.S. I know the Files section looks completely different. There is a plan to import all of the files into PW at a later date once I've built a proper file repository and do away with that third-party file repository script completely, but sadly real work is having to take precedence now. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
statestreet Posted April 9, 2012 Share Posted April 9, 2012 Congrats on the launch. It's really exciting to see such a deep and extensive community site as this built in ProcessWire—I can only imagine how much more rewarding it was to build StrategyCore in PW than it might have been in, say, Drupal! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onjegolders Posted April 9, 2012 Share Posted April 9, 2012 Site looks fantastic Pete. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apeisa Posted April 9, 2012 Share Posted April 9, 2012 Superb job Pete, looks great. I especially like the Databank -> Games section. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diogo Posted April 9, 2012 Share Posted April 9, 2012 Great job Pete! There is a problem with the footer on my Chrome (both dev and stable) and Epiphany (also WebKit). In Firefox is fine edit: now the background is dark, and the footer is ok (footer is not ok)... did you change something? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onjegolders Posted April 9, 2012 Share Posted April 9, 2012 Yeah I initially had a problem with footer too but on reload all was well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted April 9, 2012 Author Share Posted April 9, 2012 I think it might be due to some JavaScript - I was trying to figure out the bed way to stick the footer to the bottom if te screen but I guess the code (or possibly my CSS) isn't that great. Thanks for the kind words folks. I'm still hoping to do that case study at some point, but I suspect it'll be a week or two as I've still got other things to tweak. It was a long process, but very enjoyable (and it helped that pretty much every feature I thought I needed at any given time during the planning ang the build magically materialised in ProcessWire - like Ryan was reading my mind!). The other good thing is that I also have a lot of code handy now to use on other sites, and might have a module or two to release at a later date too I've got a site a bit like one of Ryan's holiday villa sites to build at some point (but for camping - the other end of the scale ) - another personal project. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryan Posted April 9, 2012 Share Posted April 9, 2012 Great site Pete! Awesome work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slkwrm Posted April 9, 2012 Share Posted April 9, 2012 Wow! Congratulations, Pete. The site looks great! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarcC Posted April 10, 2012 Share Posted April 10, 2012 Thanks for sharing, Pete. This is really a neat site you've built. I liked the bookcase effect and the way it was easy to find interviews (I always look for interviews on these types of sites) Thanks for the modules, too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arjen Posted April 10, 2012 Share Posted April 10, 2012 Works great. The bookshelf is indeed nice. Looking forward to the case study. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charliez Posted April 11, 2012 Share Posted April 11, 2012 Nice site Pete, full of great stuff (both in content and in development) ! This are good for a sticky footer if you need them: http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/ http://ryanfait.com/sticky-footer/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raydale Posted April 13, 2012 Share Posted April 13, 2012 Good site Pete. The development on this looks really strong. Are you planning to do a case study on this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted April 14, 2012 Author Share Posted April 14, 2012 Cheers for the links Charlie. Thanks Ray, I'll definitely be doing a case study at some point, just got a few other projects on the go at the moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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