5punk

FatherJack wrote:Also it's a perceptual change - wiki is old, 5punk Articles is new, plus the more it looks like a traditional games blog, the better advert it is for the site. I know I subconsciously switch between expecting entertainment or textbook material depending whether a site looks like it's a blog or a wiki.

There's no reason have it look like a blog or a wiki. A blog has an instinctive connection with frequency. If new articles aren't posted every few days it's going to look unloved.
Similarly, all wikis seem to look the same, though they need not.

I propose that the text be called from the wiki and presented in a stylish article format. Comments could be directed to the relevant thread in the forum, as is fairly common with WP/Forum integrations anyway (disabling comments is a little 'closed'; a comments section full of spam is unacceptable and virtually unavoidable). Bit-tech is a good example.

As for the wiki markup, a wordpress- or forum-style rich text editor for text entry should clear up any need for knowing or even seeing markup, and can be made consistent throughout 5punk.

An added bonus is that published articles would be cached. Articles could be displayed with little or no interaction with the database at all. Even with the caching plugin, wordpress has notoriously high overhead.

Dog Pants wrote:If what you're suggesting is something along the lines of writing your article in the Wiki which can then be dropped into a pre-formatted page that shows up as a nice clean article, then yeah that'd be great. I'd assumed it would be easier with third party stuff, but I'm by no means technical when it comes to web stuff.

That's what I was getting at, yes. Wordpress is indeed easy to install, but making it not look like a we've just slapped a wordpress blog on is less easy. Plus integration and maintenance.

That sounds spot on. I actually started trying to work out how to make the wiki look less wiki-ish a little while ago, but came to the conclusion that the work was all html formatting that was over my head. Vanilla wiki looks very bland and empty to me, but look at the WAR or WoW wiki pages and they look great. However, for the amount of attention the wiki gets it might be a waste of effort, especially if the content is presented elsewhere in a more eyecatching format.

Attractive, non wiki-looking: check
Easy to make nice-looking stuff: check
Integration to existing site: check
No overhead from WP hits: check

Sounds good to me.

I think the wiki suffers not just from it's visual style but also (in fact predominately) from being isolated from the rest of 5punk. It's different layout, colourings etc just alienate it (for me) from the rest of the site and I always forget about it.

I think everything in the wiki would be better as full webby site integrated with a blob option in the main forum list with a title like 'Information and Articles' or whatever and have the articles posted into it.

HereComesPete wrote:I think everything in the wiki would be better as full webby site integrated with a blob option in the main forum list with a title like 'Information and Articles' or whatever and have the articles posted into it.

Just add a forum where everyone can edit everyone's posts.

Noooo. Forums are a terrible place to hold information. If it's longer than a page or two people won't read it, you can't format it, information gets buried in the posts, it's hard to index them, and they look ugly.

Yeah the only time I use the wiki is when I need to look up some of the beardy stuff.

Can we called them 5punkticles?

I was thinking testicles, but that's not very clear.

Or articles of 5punk.

Well, seeing as it's forthcoming from 5punk, something with 5perm?

Oh fuck, not 5perm

5eed could work, suggest away I say!

5ticky pages?

Can we call them Smegs?

Thought 5megs

nah, everyone 'll think it's Red Dwarf fanfiction or something.

Mouth 5punks and Brain Farts?

And we could record ts or summat to podcast (it might even happen). And move all the classic threads to one place for preservation.

Monica's Dre55.

Somewhere to keep 5punk for later.

We could do an audio review of a game or something, and publish it like a podcast, or write it down and do it RPS style.