A Modders website

[skullywag]

Hi all,

I recently had a small discussion in the "mod release rules" thread regarding the issue of too many mods for this forum. I had already decided that being a professional web dev I was going to build myself a home for my mods.

I have begun that process, this is 1 hour in:


Drupal is my CMF (content management framework) of choice as I have 8+ years experience developing with it. Theres obviously no theme (skin) yet as im busy getting the ground work of categories, entities, media, links all sorted, so it looks a little dull but what is there is already html5 ready and mobile responsive (due to the awsomeness that is Adaptive theme). Im hoping to expand this beyond what you see here and rather quickly i might add. Everything that is added to this site will be available on a RESTful api by default so other sites/applications can consume the data if they so wish. Everything that ive added so far (and everything that will be added) is available to a search mechanism as well .

This thread will serve as a discussion, suggestion, feedback thread of sorts. Im planning to get articles on modding and help placed on here as well.

Im very aware of things like the nexus and other mod repos existing, personally im not a fan as they end up taking the user away from the "home" site in question and break the community. That IS NOT what this is, discussion of my mods will continue on here, they will just be categorisable/searchable in a better way than a forum can provide.

The plan is get all my stuff up on this and if the community thinks its good enough ill make it open for people to add their stuff. There is no money making intent behind this, no advertising will be used, this is purely because I have the skills and the want of it.

So if anything here has grabbed your interest, you want to help in any way (cant promise anything) or you think its a bad idea, let me know, im interested to hear peoples ideas/feedback.

[deslona]

I would agree that the modding section, especially in the 'release' sub-forum is cluttered I think this could be reasonably solved with adding Alpha X sub-forums for older versions of mods. And moving the threads there. If a new version for a new alpha comes out the modder can make a new thread in the new section and make a post in the older thread pointing to the newer one. This would help people find older iterations easily (if that's what they like). There can always be a sticky at the top for the list of mods currently supported by that Alpha.

TLDR - A new website isn't necessary, but better organization for this site is. Even if there was a new website, the mod section still needs to be better organized. We have a lot of creative people making mods here.

[Zxypher]

Is there a reason to not just use the Nexus website? It already exists and is well established as a place to go for mods. Just curious.

[skullywag]

ive already stated why i dont use the nexus and also as stated this is for me due to the changes to the forums mod release rules so I can be more productive. A forum only works for this sort of thing for so long until you need an easily searchable system which doesnt require a moderator moving stuff constantly.

[RemingtonRyder]

It's actually not that big of a deal to have to move topics around. You may have noticed that there's a few less pages in the Releases section. I moved a bunch of them over using a fairly slow tablet and it was much less RSI-inducing than on the computer.

I like the layout of the Nexus but submitting each file for the first time is a bit of a pain.

[skullywag]

the cleaning and pruning of the mod section will only slow down the inevitable move to something else, we will (hopefully) have a lot of modders in the future, the forum wont handle that well and I personally hate keeping thread OPs up to date, filling in a few fields or changing a url here and there is much more up my street and keeping everything as granular as i can is how i work, so this lumping all my mods together in 1 thread is no good for me, hence this build.

[Famous Shoes]

@skullywag, just in case you haven't looked at it, https://kerbalstuff.com might be inspirational -- I believe this was created by modders after the much lamented decision by Squad to use http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal as the official mod website. Kerbal Stuff folks seem to have had similar notions as you.

[RemingtonRyder]

Is it possible to have a 'convert to BBCode or basic HTML' operation?

[skullywag]

of course it is but convert what? give me your use case.

[RemingtonRyder]

Oh, sorry. When I originally wrote my reply above, it got eaten by a browser crash on my tablet. I was thinking for something like bullet-pointed change logs, documentation, things like that.

[letharion]

I think this is an excellent idea. I've thought on and off about making a website for a while. What I'd really like is for modpacks to become self updating, which of course requires a lot of mods to be meaningful.

I'm https://www.drupal.org/u/letharion so I should be able to contribute something to the site you've started.

What do you think about the modpacks idea, and would you be open to open the site on github or similar?

[skullywag]

yeah itll go on github eventually. Im a little busy right now but im doing bits here and there. Im sure modpacks will will be a thing in some form or another have to see once i have the bare bones sorted.

[letharion]

yeah itll go on github eventually. Im a little busy right now but im doing bits here and there. Im sure modpacks will will be a thing in some form or another have to see once i have the bare bones sorted.

Cool, I'd be happy to help out, so let me know when you have something up that I can look at, and I'll try to sort some PRs