The First Blog

Hi all,

After several hours of coding yesterday, I have extended the Games section to include blogs.

It was very challenging, and quite fun to code. I think it demonstrates the flexibility of the overall system and how extendable it is (not that you guys really understand, but I was able to make this really fast).

I have added a new "blog" page in everyone's blog settings. For single-page games, you won't notice a thing. For the cooler people with pages enabled, the blog link will now be visible for everyone. Eg,

Obviously this can be disabled (or renamed) in the ACP of your game page.

Since the blogs are a link, single-page games will only have sidebar links. That's the only way for your visitors to get to your blogs (apart from links on the website, eg recent activity). You could always be cool and enable pages so you'll have a link in your menu to the blogs.

All game pages will now have this in the sidebar:


To create a blog, enter you ACP and the last menu on the sidebar will be "Blog". Here you're presented with a simple interface for writing up your blog. It is a simple textbox (what else) with all forum BBCode available (I do plan to create a comprehensive page displaying all BBCodes and how to use them).


Creating blog entries will create two new sections of your site:

• A blog listing which displays all of your page posts
• The entry page, which displays the blog entry.

Blog listing


The entry page


I think the best features of this system are the interactive ones and community (potential) involvement. People create game pages, get demotivated and leave them to rot. With this blog system, the game page gets a whole new purpose. Each blog post will show up on the Recent Activity on the forums, so people are going to see your blog entries.


And the best feature of all….. Every entry has its own comments. It's exactly the same as posting a new topic every single for your game updates.. except not spam It brings all of your game content into one place.



Don't forget to report bugs. This particular update is the biggest since release, and a lot of code was written into the system. It's extra prone to bugs. I did a once over through the system and everything was good apart from screenie uploads. Anything else please let me know asap.

Enjoy