Next version of S2

I've been working for weeks on the next version of S2, and it's getting close to ready. I'm going to make a few posts here along with some commentary on what you're looking at.</p>

Feel free to ask questions, make suggestions, and tell me how ugly it is (like always </p>

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First off, here's the home page.</p>

It's similar to what we have, minus the top story. I know I use the home page for the recent activity feature, and I suspect a lot of people do as well, and I didn't want to lose the spirit of this in the new S2.</p>

What's new, in particular, is the lack of drop-down menus. Instead, the vertical buttons on the left change dynamically to give you options relevent to what you're looking at. That is, when looking at NBA stuff, the buttons are NBA related.</p>

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Based on member feedback, the SportsTicker content is relatively separated from the forums and other features. It's still easy to access from the forums, though. The new S2 software does a much better job of presenting the SportsTicker files, as well.</p>

The attached images are of the NBA standings page and NBA scoreboard page. You can see the buttons on the left are basketball-related, though you can still easily find other parts of the site.</p>

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The forums are based on IP.Boards 2.3.2. I've imported a backup of the S2 DB from a few weeks ago, so the posts you see in the images are pretty old, but good enough to give you all the idea of what it's going to be like.</p>

Here's the Forums home page to give you an idea of how the forum layout will be initially. I want to stress that the forum structure shown is to simplify the importing of the current S2 site. Once we've all moved over to the new software, we can trivially move stuff around, make new forums, delete forums, rearrange things, etc. These things are near impossible to do before we move.</p>

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To get an idea of what a team page and team forum look like and how they work together, here's some screenshots. I chose the Nets because it's a popular forum, but it generally looks the same for all the teams (and even all the sports).</p>

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For most sports, there's a "Game" page that has Preview/Recap/Box Score/Events mode. That is, for each game, there's a page with these four things.</p>

See attachments for examples of the most recent Nets game.</p>

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I'm not forgetting about sports other than Basketball. I've already done a lot of work on NCAA basketball, football, women's basketball, EPL, NFL, NHL, and am currently working on MLB.</p>

Here's some screen shots of NFL and EPL.</p>

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Worthy of a post of its own. SportsTicker is sending some MMA content, so there's going to be an MMA section on the new S2.</p>

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Also worthy about a dedicated post is the IPB member page. The choice of message board software was driven by several factors. IPB was chosen because it fits the spirit of what S2 has tried to do all along - build community and promote the posters as the stars of the site (vs. the posts being the stars). IPB has a number of social networking features that are considerably more advanced than I've seen on the various other message boards we evaluated. The member page is a good example of this, featuring "friends", member blog, notes left by other members, and so on.</p>

See attachment for what the member page looks like.</p>

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Beyond the SportsTicker and IPB/Message Boards, the new S2 has several features to help promote activities that have been popular to date.</p>

We've added the IP.Blogs module so people can continue (or start) to blog as always.</p>

We've added the IP.Gallery module so the GFX team can showcase their work and so S2 can actually host the gfx files that people use on the site (e.g. photos, avatars, signature graphics, wallpapers, whatever).</p>

There's a nifty Articles system for our developing Writer's Central program to take advantage of.</p>

There's also an integration with WikiMedia (the software that drives WikiPedia) so we can build a nice sports encyclopedia, knowledge base, fan pages, and other wiki-oriented content.</p>

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<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (BG7 Lavigne)</div><div class='quotemain'></p>

Don't put up the IPB prison. That had to be the worst idea for a message board ever.</p>

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What exactly is your beef with it?</p>

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That's it for now. If you have requests for other screen shots, let me know. Feel free to comment on what you see and please give me feedback.</p>

 

I applied a hack that lets you embed youtube and about 14 other sites' kinds of video.</p>

there's a [video] tag, and I tried to make the [youtube] tag a synonim.</p>

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I've been targetting 12/14 to do a relaunch, but it may slip by a few days.</p>

Immediately after the switch, I expect a few glitches that should be trivial to resolve, but I'm begging everyone to tolerate them, report them ASAP, and get about having fun with all the new features.</p>

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The buttons on the left are kinda neat. You can click anywhere on them like a traditional button, but you can right click on the text of the button (it's a link) and open new tabs in your browser.</p>

I want to talk about the WHY's of the switch over.</p>

1. An off-the-shelf product like IPB is feature rich and fully tested. I don't have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, just to match the same feature set that already exists.
2. In turn, this frees up my time to work on improving the SportsTicker part of the site and do more games/contests like Pick Em.
3. There's all kinds of hacks/mods available for IPB (and other boards) that I don't have to invent as well. One that isn't shown but that I'm about to add is a flash games arcade - there's thousands of games available for it, and I expect we'll add them to the site over time (the download sites only let me download 8/day, but I hope to get help downloading from the community members).
4. IPB (and other boards) are written in PHP using MySQL back-end. This is the same language and DB setup that S2 currently uses. From my viewpoint as a developer, IPB is a starting point, not the ending point - that is, I can and will modify the source code so it does pretty much what we want it to. We don't have to just live with what it is out of the box.
5. It's much more compatible with all the browsers out there. I expect it's going to work with hand-held devices much better than the current S2 does.
6. The editor is what I gather (from feedback) much more what people want to use and will enjoy using. It is, after all, the "invitation" to post, and it should make people happy.
7. With the current S2 software, I tend to be a bottleneck in getting things done. IPB should allow all the rest of the S2 staff to get much more involved in the daily operations of things. I know you guys know how to operate software like IPB, and the work of US as a team will further the quality of the site much faster than me doing most of it on my own.
8. I am particualrly counting on the GFX teams from the various sites that have merged as part of S2 to take the new S2 by the horns and radically improve the look. What we're starting with is a really raw (spartan but clean, IMO) site. What it will be in a month and further down the road is not at all in my hands.
9. I have a vision for this version of S2 that makes it not a typical IPB kind of site. Most IPB sites (in fact, all!) I've seen tend to be a home page with a "site" link and a "forums" link and the two are very distinct/separate. What I'm seeing of the new S2 as I use it and develop it is that it feels like one big site and the integration of my custom software and the forums software is seemless. Unlike other IPB sites out there.
10. I've been watching and listening to all kinds of feedback about S2. I wish I could snap my fingers and make massive numbers and quality of changes in an instant, but things take time. The new S2 should address the deserved criticisms while maintaining our identity as not "yet another IPB (or VB3) site."

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