The Shining Source

Just a little shot of something I'm working on at the moment. I've always wanted to make it a little easier for people to manage their projects and post news, but never really had the time (or inclination) to do it. Seeing as The Shiny Sword is getting more love, I thought it might be nice to start updating a few things. Still a long way to go, here's some of the things I want to get done:

• Customizable dashboard thingy, with boxes for project info (shown), notifications, watched forum topics etc
• Choose which bits of information get shown on project pages (like galleries, status updates, source commits etc)
• Get notifications of when projects you like are updated
• Probably some other stupid ideas I haven't thought of yet

I guess what I'm really going for is two fold: I'd like people to post more, and I'd like people to be able to "watch" a project and then get updates (either via their dashboard or via email).

I'm open for suggestions, of course

Looks quite awesome to me! Also good going with maintaining the color scheme! I love my blues .

I don't really feel like redesigning the site. I've made a couple of appearance tweaks, but nothing major. I'd much rather work on features that help build the community. Plus my art & design skills suck

Fully agree. aesthetics are for weaklings!

Any suggestions for things you'd like on your project page? So far I have the following ideas:

• Banner images
• Screenshot Gallery
• Downloads
• Latest News
• Latest worklogs
• Progress meter
• Custom pages (like the BABS ones on the Shiny Sword page)
• Latest Activity (shows when news is posted, worklogs made, screenshots added etc)
• Source control stats (files, average changes etc)
• Source control changelog
• Latest forum posts
• Maybe twitter updates?

Ideally I'd like people to treat their project pages like a mini homepage that does all the hard work for them, so they can concentrate on the fun things.

Perhaps a page that shows open positions in the dev team or even a voluntary donation page?

We could also integrate some of the stuff with Facebook perhaps, e.g. that people can like the project, which then propagates to there?

Hmm, those sound like good ideas. I could create a "donate" module for PayPal accounts, along with a target meter (if people want to set targets). There's a couple of tweaks I can make so that things are easier to share on social media, so I'll add them.

There will also be a tiny little surprise when the new features get added

Still working on the upgrades Here's a look at the activity stream widget. You'll be able to stick one of these on your dashboard and project page. There will probably be a page on TSS to show all project updates too.

Niice!
That looks pretty swanky I'd say .

Cheers mate Still lots to do, but it's getting there. Hopefully there should be something solid to show in the next month or so.

Here's the updated dashboard with "edit" mode enabled, so widgets can be dragged around and removed. There will be something similar for project pages, so people can choose to have a screenshot gallery, featured video or whatever else on their page.

Here's a few more screenshots for you good folks.

The first is the project appearance page, which is used to set icons and banners etc. Nothing too spectacular, but it gives more control to project owners.

The next is of the fancy new file upload thingy. I wanted to make it easy for people to upload images, so it handles drag & drop. Some pages also allow multiple files to be dropped at the same time, such as the new "create a post" screen (coming soon!)

Finally there's the project commit history. It's a totally optional feature, but it can be set up to automatically add updates whenever a commit is made to Subversion (and eventually Git).

So yeah, I haven't forgotten you Blah  

One more screenshot - this is of the project page editor. The idea is you can add a bunch of blocks to your project page and drag them around. Boxes can be customized as well, so the gallery box can be set to show images only from certain galleries.

It's pretty similar to the dashboard customization, except everyone that visits the project page gets to see it. You can also customize the sidebar and create custom sub-pages (for character bios, maps etc). Still got a ways to go, but it's getting there.

Oh, and it also has an API for grabbing information from the site. So far you can get project info, news, downloads and images. The new Shining Online site will use the API to populate the news, worklogs and screenshot gallery, which is pretty neat.