Classic-Castle.com

It'd be really really cool if the main site had an RSS feed. FBTB recently redid their site to include one and it's made a big difference to me and, I imagine, to lots of their users.

Not important to me, but maybe for some users, would be a feed from the forums. I guess that'd have to be considered a separate question.

I'm willing to help with the implementation if that would make things easier.

Any chance this will happen?

Hey Mr. Shiny and New

That would be cool, but doesn't work with the way we currently do the front page. Right now we manually update the html code on the front page to add new articles, move things to the archives, etc. If we had a more automated way of doing this, it might be possible to automatically generate the archives, make them searchable, add tags, add an RSS feed, and maybe other features I'm not thinking of. If you (or anyone) have the coding expertise and the time and interest in working on this, PM one of the admins.

Bruce

PM'ed

I can't help by donating time, but one option to consider might be WordPress. It's technically a blogging platform (both TBB and Klocki are on WP), but the recent upgrade to FBTB.net has demonstrated that WP can work for existing non-blog LEGO fan sites.

I believe it did take some time to migrate the content, but in the end, it gave FBTB.net a much cleaner experience, searchable archives, and (I assume) a much easier system to maintain (vs. hand-coding HTML).

Just a thought...

It is a though. However we would prefer to not have a standard "blog" look to the main page. Ideally CC could have a similar appearance to the current page but with some blog-like functionality (easy to update, rss feeds, etc).

Ben

The thing I PM'ed Bruce N H about is essentially what you two have said (Dunechaser and architect).

WordPress would give you the RSS functionality you need, plus with WP 2.7 there is plenty of functionality to make it work as the kind of CMS you need. Also, it wouldn't be that difficult to use WordPress to make the site look less bloggy. In fact, I could make it look pretty much exactly like it does now (or a little better).

I know I'm relatively new here on Classic Castle, so I'm not sure if you'd like to let me do it, but I'd be glad to donate some time to the effort. To see some of my work check out duckingham.com and wishorchard.com.

If you're interested I'd create a mockup WordPress installation on a "hidden" folder on one of my other sites, to give you guys a chance to look at the work before we got to the point of migrating it over.

It would be a pretty straightforward thing to set up the database, import content, etc., and then when you're ready for the migration we'd just need to coordinate a little bit.

Of course, if someone else is available and has the time and is already better known at CC, by all means -- I won't be the least bit offended.

But, if not, I'll be glad to start mocking it up for you. Just give the word.

While there is nothing wrong with blogs and/or wordpress, I personally find them akin to being the 'fast food' of the internet. Fansites like C-C are more of the 'meat and potatoes', if you will... and each has it's place.

If the site looks the same, and has the same content, what difference does it make if it's running a blog cms or not?

I agree with wobnam. "Blog" is a generic term these days that has lots of connotations depending on who is using it. I wasn't aware that FBTB is using WordPress but it seems like a good candidate.

Sir Nelson, Classic-Castle.com IS a blog, in a sense. It has articles about various topics. It has a front page which is edited on an ongoing basis. It has a forum where people can discuss things. It just doesn't have a comment section for each article.

I would recommend CC.c move to a blog platform such as WordPress. To keep the site outwardly working as it does now we'd have to disable commenting on the articles, which is probably fine because there is already a forum. However article comments could be enabled later if people want that. The advantage to using WordPress is lots of functionality which doesn't need to be re-done from scratch. Does anyone have details about how/where CC.c is hosted? Will we be able to run WordPress or something similar?

Duckingham seems to be very interested in spearheading this project, which is fine with me, but I offer my services if someone has a specific task they need done. I am a software developer and have lots of experience with HTML/CSS/JavaScript and databases. If this site switches to WordPress we may want to automate the importing of the old articles. I might be able to help with this.

Mr. Shiny & New wrote:However article comments could be enabled later if people want that.

I think this is the main thing the admins want to avoid. Article comments on the main page keeps people from joining the site and posting in the forums. This is a major difference between a site like CC and TBB. Each has their own merits.

At this time the admins top priority is to upgrade the forums to prevent the large number of spammers joining Classic-Castle. We may make changes to the main page as a phase two project.

Ben

wobnam wrote:If the site looks the same, and has the same content, what difference does it make if it's running a blog cms or not?

Agreed.
The tool is what runs the thing, the editors, users and content is what make the site.

I didn't know you run this site entirely by editting html. Wow, that's a "Megablocks" of a job.
I'd say, consider using a complete cms. I myself prefer Joomla, bridged with phpbb (3).
We use that at Lowlug, and it works very nice.
If you want more info about that, pm me
O, and, the importing function of phpbb3, to import from phpbb2, works great, I know from experience