Show & Tell (GDU Refinery) is back in action!

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Show & Tell Section officially open for business

Submissions are now open for the Show & Tell section. This section has been renamed from the GDU Refinery to Show & Tell to make it obvious for new visitors exactly what the section is for. All of the classic refinery post types are back: Snapshot, Literature, Audio, Question, Code and Video.

It should be super obvious where you need to click to submit a Show & Tell post. I've added a new global button menu for all types of content submissions. There's other links too which should be intuitive. Through this menu, you can see the power of the integration of the Forum with the CMS. You can submit a topic, view notifications etc. everywhere on the entire website.

Show & Tell posts themselves are relatively simple at the moment. There's a bunch of interactive features I could add, and I probably will in the future. Right now I'm trying to keep things really simple. One cool thing I want to implement is a "reaction" menu, so it is more than just a "like".

Snapshots now allow for multiple images

That's right, you can now post one or more images into your snapshot "gallery". The images will show up in your post as a slider, and users will be able to navigate between them. Here's an example: https://gdu.one/refinery/recent-activity-is-up/

Old Gallery images moved to Show & Tell

I have moved 400+ images from the "Screenshots" and "Works in Progress" gallery categories into Show & Tell posts. Show & Tell effectively replaces these categories. These images are old, but this allows me to preserve this content and clean up the gallery by removing these redundant gallery categories. The Gallery is now more focused on submissions for Game Dev image resources. In another example of the power of this new system, it took about 30mins for me to migrate all of this data to the new system. That is silly fast - it still involves a little bit of code to extract the data.

New homepage

I've got a basic homepage running, but its a WIP which I'll slowly develop over time. The idea is that it will be a portal of new content only.

A few issues persist

There's a few things I'm aware of that you guys might encounter while using Show & Tell and the other CMS sections once they're re-opened. The first is that sometimes you will get logged out of the CMS after a short time. I'm looking into this. A bit tricky to debug. I have also not implemented an edit function. This will be crucial for the games section, but it's not a pirority right now for Show & Tell.

Selling your Games

Before my lockdown ends, I really want to get the games section back open. Obviously everything on the old site (except  the forum) has been replaced, so the system is completely different. Games are complex and consist of multiple content types wrapped into one. It's like doing the Show & Tell stuff 5-times over. One of the delays and one thing I really want to announce, is that I am implementing a system which allow members to sell their games from GDU. It will be a professional e-commerce system, and I will implement this directly into games posts. At the moment, I am planning on developers to take 100% sale price minus transfer fees. Stay tuned!