Upgrades!

2009 Nov 01

So, first off, "NO" it's not happening live yet. :-) However I did get a fully functional version of swag running on my local machine today, and have begun the process to upgrade swag to the newest versions of EVERYTHING. Now what that actually means? I'm still working on that a bit, but I think it will be a really great stepping stone towards helping swag to grow and mature to that next phase as a site.

With that said, I'm going to outline some of my specific goals for the site right now:

  1. First and foremost, I want to make SWAG more inclusive. What that actually means is that we're probably going to start up the Community gallery again. I'm actively taking steps to make this happen right now.
  2. Second: Forum improvements. Drupal's come a long way since I put this site up, both in general, and also specifically the forums. We'll be looking to get some nice improvements there.
  3. Third: Administrative Flexibility. I have a lot of that already, but I've personally learned a lot about how a Drupal site SHOULD be setup since I originally built SWAG, and I'll be taking that knowledge, and making better use of it than I have in the past. This should allow me to more easily accomplish things like "Featured Art" and the like.
  4. Forth: Search Engine Optimization. As I said, I've learned a lot about Drupal since I setup SWAG initially, and included in that is some SEO savvy. Suffice it to say, SWAG has some great Search Engine Placement now, but I think I can improve upon it in a pretty significant way, and we'll be trying.

There are a number of other things I hope to achieve with this upgrade, but these are the 4 I wanted to share. I also hope to put some nice touches on the existing theme to make the site a bit more user friendly, but that's kind of gravy IMO at the moment. Hopefully you all will get to actually see some of this in the next 2-4 weeks, but I wanted to at least make everyone aware that it was happening. Thanks for staying tuned, and I'll keep you all updated!

Eclipse

JediScholar

Hey! That is great news!

I have one tiny little feature request - I'm a lowly member of the site, not the guild, and not very good at graphics work, I would like to have, say in my profile, a way of collecting the requests that I've put in to the site, maybe as just a set of links or a mini-gallery. Just to be able to show to folks, but also to find them easily if need be - is that a possibility?

Rock on!

JS

Also, I'm more of a writer type, let me know if SWAG needs help on that end.

Eclipse

JediScholar,

I have a feature that does exactly that already implemented on the test site. :-) You can count on it being in the final I think.

Eclipse

jeremymjack

i am super syked about the improvements! say, is there any way to make the commenting and replying more spefic to the person writing it. currently if you comment or reply it goes to the end of the pile. if a reply was under the comment it was replying to that would be awesome! and maybe something in your profile that tells you if someone has commented on one of your pieces or replied to a comment you have made... too complicated?

jer

more here! www.thelegendofjer.deviantart.com

Eclipse

Jer,

So, I hate threaded comments, cause you can never tell where all the new commenting is, thus the reason swag works the way it does. Though I am thinking about putting together a "subscribe to replies" feature, but we'll see. (for the record, I could totally do what you're asking, but I think it makes the site much more difficult to interact with, when you could just do like @thelegendofjer or something so they know you're talking to them)

Eclipse