Since this caught me whilst out-of-town and a bit too busy to think about it, allow me to continue. I'll probably ramble a bit aimlessly, so don't look too hard for the point.
My goal when starting this site was to make a place where anyone could submit fan-related content -- reviews, fiction, theoretical dissertations, artwork, etc. -- while still giving me the opportunity to dabble in aspects of PHP and CSS that I don't have the freedom to play with in my day-job.
I was thinking I wanted it to behave similar to the kind of flexibility that Wikipedia or a *-"nuke" portal had -- but not be stuck with a user interface geared toward programmers, a templating system that lacked flexibility and limited creativity, and an information model that didn't allow for a useful end-user-friendly site organization. Most everything seemed to be geared more towards the programmer than the designer. Or those systems geared toward the designer tended to not allow enough simple programmer tweaking. And on top of that, make content-entry easy enough, and rewarding enough, for real, normal people.
Finally, I wanted to take the challenge of integrating free, complete "off-the-shelf" components and put them together in a way that Keeps It Simple Stupid ...and that I could then spin off into a potential side-business...
Obviously, having such a widely-scoped, lavish "vision" of the site has contributed to my endless tinkering, but a lack of time has contributed to my complete lack of results beyond our fun little forum here.
That said, I still dislike the "wiki" way, though I'm softening that stance a bit if it means that I can tap into the community enthusiasm to actually start producing
content. Content is king. Content drives Google page ranks, which drives traffic, which Gets Attention (for good or bad...
).
So I want to host whatever it is over here to be part of the Bee Train Fan family. Like I've said many times, I've got bandwidth and diskspace to spare. I would also look to integrate it with this forum, the soon-to-be-installed new-improved gallery (with AVI and MP3 support!), and my content-management-system-of-choice. But for now it can just co-exist so content can get authored.
Koveras, for the customizations of the MediaWiki instance, are you able to just alter template files without digging into the core codebase at this point? If we can set this up as a quick "Keep It Simple Stupid" installation to help us ramp up, without doing anything that will jepordize our upgrade path or cross-application intergration points, then I think you'll find that we'll have all sorts of potential bells & whistles we can start adding to this thing. Best application for the task, but seamlessly blend all of the tasks so you don't know there are different applications driving them. And whatnot.
