Seasons of Change

A refresh of this website has been long overdue…

When I originally setup WorldsUnknown.com with Simple Machine Forums, the purpose was less for stimulating dialog than it was to serve as a personal tool for organizing information about my campaign setting. At the time, forums were a technology that I was very familiar with, I had never so much as heard of a wiki, and the idea of blogging seemed peculiar at best.

Fast forward about 6 years and things have changed a bit. I’ve found that the freeform nature of a wiki serves my original needs much better than a forum. Indeed, the very act of having to select a category in which to create a stand-alone topic beforehand was rather stiffling. Some topics are simply relevant to many different categories.

As far as “news” updates go, well… I’ll let the scarcity of news updates on the old forums attest to how well that worked.

So what lies ahead?

First off, wordpress will now be the tool used to publish anything you might consider news. The comment facility of this software should work every bit as well (if not better) than the forums ever did. In addition, this looks a lot nicer than the web portal mod I’d slapped on the forums (which actually made applying software updates rather difficult). I’ll most likely still keep the message boards around in some form, but they won’t be the landing page for the site anymore.

The next thing I’d like to do is to replace the photo gallery functionality of the forums with something more robust — perhaps Coppermine. I’m also thinking about making a very simple landing page for WorldsUnknown.com instead of taking users directly into either WordPress or the SMF forums. We’ll see.

Ideally, I’d like to make it so that you only need one login for the site. There seem to be various tools to handle linking WordPress, Coppermine, SMF, and MediaWiki together in various combinations so I’ll just have to experiment and see what works. Whatever the solution, my hope is that all of the existing forum memberships can be retained.

As for MediaWiki, that’s been up and running for sometime at wiki.worldsunknown.com. Right now, it should be visible to anyone, but since I intend to keep myself as the only author (excepting comments), I’m in no hurry to go modifying it just yet.

So there you have it. As time permits, there will be some changes happening around here but I’ll try to provide links if I completely sever access to something.

Take care,