Well folks, it’s been a very long time coming, but it’s here at last – the new, improved SFC!
My free time over the last 4 years hasn’t been quite what it used to be, but I’ve been working hard on SFC’s new custom CMS and new site layout on and off for all that time.
I’ve still a lot of data to add and update, but I decided that the site is now far enough along to launch – otherwise I shall be completely sick of the sight of it before it even goes live on the web 😉
Perhaps not a great deal has changed content-wise, but the new CMS is almost finished and will allow me to set up additional staff members to update the site – hopefully this will mean fresher content and more updates even when I’m not able to do as much here myself as I’d like to.
Here’s a quick list of what’s new or changed:
- News is no longer just for news, but for features in general, allowing staffers to post articles and musings about the series in times of little or no actual Shining news. Got some good ideas for future features already!
- The Game Reviews section will soon be accepting submissions from SFCers.
- Shining Videos are now hosted on YouTube to save on bandwidth and disk space – this has also allowed me to more easily embed the videos into the pages for a nicer look!
- Magazine Articles are now converted into PDFs, meaning no more need to download individual pages.
- We’ve got Polls again, and updated Shining product links/adverts throughout the site.
- Shining Studies now includes the SFIII HQ Bookshelves translations as well as the Character Name translations (these were removed from the old site, with plans to add them via the Shining Electronic Encyclopedia (“SEE”) which never really got off the ground. We’ve also got the Shining Races page back which had been lost for the same reason.
- Shopping links, Series Introduction & Series Developers pages have been updated.
- The Links Directory has been overhauled, making it much more simple for members to suggest new links and report dead ones. Staffers can now easily remove dead links and approve new links. We’ve also now got a links rating system, so you can vote for your favourite Shining sites and help organise the links by their quality.
- Various pages in Site Information have been updated.
- Competitions and Greetings cards have been (temporarily?) removed while I consider how important they are for the site and think about rebuilding these areas.
- We now have a twitter feed to allow for quick news updates, which are displayed on the main page. I plan to allow other staffers access to this account once I’ve got the CMS into a sufficiently usable state for them 😉
Please bear with me while I get data added for the newer games in the series and sort out member submissions for Fanart, FAQs etc. I may take the easy option and set up a forum for such submissions rather than setting up submissions via the site & CMS. We’ll see what time I have 🙂
Right, time for me to prep the files and hope all is well with moving this site from its test location… eeek! It’s a bit scary going live now, it’s been so long in the works. Wish me luck, and let me know if anything’s broken *fingers crossed*