Highly Customized Site - Silky Venom

[Oloh]

www.silkyvenom.com

We have made some fun improvements so I just wanted to give a list of some customizations that our team made, just to toss some ideas out there for other folks, if interested. Unfortunately, most of the stuff is hacked together specifcally for the site and works with other smaller customizations we made, so it is not very clean to make a mod for any of these that can be easilly applied. :ermm:

1. We have three types of news forums, so changed the color of the post to reflect type of news it is...News (news blurbs), Features (articles) and Guild News. That is why you will see Red, Purple and Gold news. It is based on the type.

2. We found that we were updating too frequently, and certain important topics were being dropped off the main page too quickly. We also wanted to update a lot, and noticed that people have a tendency to look at the first news post as a judge to see if the site has been updated. So if you stickied a news topic (which kept it at the top of the main page), then folks would not realized you updated. To remedy that, we added in the recent highlights block at the top of the index page.

3. The message diplay for the news forums when linked from the mine page has been tweaked to look like "forumlike" and more "article and comment" like. Here is what I mean http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2433

4. Nolaquen, our resident wizard, made the nifty "Dev Tracker." It scans forms that the developers of the video game we follow are known to post on (in addition to ours) and generates links to any posts they make. This has a labor intensive front end, in that we have to get thier usernames and register a tracking account, but the back end is pretty much automatic content. http://www.silkyvenom.com/?page=devtracker

5. Nolaquen created a custom article system that uses vbtemplates, but not the forums to diplay archived content. He created a nifty little back end that we use internally, and the output looks like this http://www.silkyvenom.com/?page=articles&articleid=7.

6. We (really Nolaquen again....does anyone else even do anything? heh.) have completely revised the vBulletin FAQ to make it expandable http://www.silkyvenom.com/pages/faq.php.

7. With the amount of content we have on the site, and the amount that we plan to have, keeping a clean navigation for the art style (Feyshtey did the art, and is awesome in more than just websites) was a challenge. Nolaquen (again) put together a little javascript to handle it the way it is now. We have a bank of icons for the top right ("Wiki" "FAQ") etc that we can drop in to highlight areas of the site we see fit.

8. We added support for regularly updated columns. The game we follow is known to be made with cutting edge (and therefore system instensive) technology, so a lot of our users have hardware questions. Fozzik, our resident hardware guru prompted us to take his forum and give the functionality to allow him to do more of a column style presentation. It is here http://www.silkyvenom.com/?page=fozzik. Also, we linked his column to his old forum in a fun way, I think here http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=19.


Our biggest challenge right now is that we are having some growing pains based on the number of hits and users we are getting. We have the whole site using one MySQL database so, during busy times, we are getting some DB errors and too many connection errors. Nolaquen is exploring some ways to ease the database load and increase performance. If anyone notices any tips when browsing, let me know.

Anyway, just figured I would drop in some stuff that we worked on to make Silky Venom a success so far. Unfortunately, I wish I could say that the mods or the system got us the users that we have, but in reality, it was really the hard work of our news and content teams. vb (and the team members who tweak it) do an awesome job of having tools needed to present the regularly updated content, but the content itself is what is the draw. Just something to keep in mind for those of you that are starting fresh.

Use vb as a tool, not as the draw.



*Note we just updated the entire site to 3.5 and even though it has a lot of tweaks, I think the migration went pretty cleanly.