dswp.cube

[XTJ7]

I created a wallpaper (which will also be used on our new dswp news page) for download in 2560x1600.



Download now

[SvaRoX]

Looks cool, I hadn't seen this version of the future news page too.
Is it an ice cube to remind people you love icy maps ? =)

Edit : what if we need to illustrate the news with a pic, will the image be included in the news content only ?

[XTJ7]

If we wanted to include it anywhere else, that would be possible from a layout perspective (replace the background of the news content, that contains the ice cube, for example), but we would need our own news system then and couldn't just rely on forum threads. Not unless we modify the database of the phpBB3 more and also the topic creation features, the permission system etc.
I mean, we could do that, but a seperate news system would be less work than that. If you think that will be necessary, we should consider that from the beginning, instead of starting out with news inside a forum

[havoc]

board has pretty much what you need for simple news thingy.
i mean, simple one. if you want categorization, additional article elements like short preview, tags, back tracks, multiple pages per article and so on, it wont do without modifying the db at least (see the end of the post for a possible solution to this).

but for simple news its perfectly ok, you have title and body - the most basic things for an article, and some basic formatting of the text with bbcode, you can include images if you want to...

all you need is a separate forum for the news, then a query that shows last 10 - or whatever last count you need - first posts from those topics for the 1st page.
you can also show the rest of the posts formatted as comments but thats not good practice for a first page. anyway if we assume the first-page posts as masters, and the whole topic in the forum as the details - its ok.

a short preview - that is, if you do not want the whole article on the first page, which you probably dont, and you dont want to cut off automagically short piece of text for preview, because that really sucks, you can add another bbcode tag to divide the preview from the rest of the text (or for that matter, whatever other division of the content you may need). of course, you can go the other way too and show only the titles and dates.

so in short what im saying is, the board has everything needed to do as basic news thingy, and you can add more elements to the news article by creating bbcode tags for your needs. no need to do much else really.

[XTJ7]

The BB code idea is very nice. Make it a hidden bbcode called [description] that does nothing else but the [b] tag, make text bold. However, if it is used inside a news, the news.php script will just extract the contents of [description] enclosed text and use it for the description of a news.
For the pictures we could just attach a picture and call it news in the description, so the script could easily find the corresponding file. If we would want to do categories, it would be easy to do that either via subforums or via prefixes (I'd probably suggest this method).
This way we could also solve the issue I mentioned above. Attach a picture with the description news_bg and it replaces the background of the news. Might be rarely needed, but it could be used that way.

[eXeler0n]

For the news it looks very nice, but as wallpaper there is something missing in the background. It looks to empty

[havoc]

ye prefixes or subforums will do perfect job for categories if needed. subforums has kind of advantage since it will divide the posts in the db (will only make it a bit easier if you decide to move that content later in another module/cms/whatever), but it will divide them then in the master forum too, thus hiding the actual article 1 more level which sucks, so i guess prefix wins here.

as for the [description] ye thats what i meant too. great minds think alike ye? :)

as for the image, that news_bg is kind of a trap since it depends on human input, making it a bit of an uncertain method. of course, easier solution would be to show the bg (or thumb, depending on how you decide on it) if there is an image attached, if no - show nothing.

[Rayne]

Looks very nice, you did this in a 3-D modeling program?

[wurst]

cool u made me clean up my desktop!

[havoc]

btw i can vector-draw that "dswp" thing later, just give a sign if you need it