As many of you (hopefully) know, we’ve started to develop a new forum system for Wintendo.

For those who don’t, a couple of days before New Year’s Day, kevin and I were talking. Around that time we had been trying to mod the site and add new features. Because the forum system was written by someone else, it was quite the hassle to add new features. For one, they did not take these kinds of modifications into account when writing the site, so that didn’t help us much. And we had to disect the code to find out what it was doing. Ever since I met kevind23 (late August) I’d been bugging him to switch over to using ASP.NET. After a lot of preaching about how much easier it’d be to use it, and the problems that would arise from doing these modifications, we eventually decided that it would be better if we were to write the forums ourselves. Then we would know exactly how they work and adding new features would be simple from then on.

So since New Year’s, Wintendo has undergone many changes. The new Wintendo, that is. The current site that’s out there hasn’t been changed it a while, because we’re focusing our time on getting the new Wintendo released as soon as possible. Some screenshots have surfaced, and now today you will know exactly what’s been done over the past month, and what’s left to come.

Let’s start off with what we’ve managed to do so far…

• Membership (Registration / Login functionality) has been done since the first few days of development.
• We’ve ensured that the whole site is easily themed; expect a theme choice from early on.
• The forum system works well internally; front-end formatting still needs some work.
• The private messaging system is in a similar state, but still has some tweaking to be done.
• The user control panel / settings is a small job, but is only about 30% done.
• Emblem Editor DS Online has been redone, with a few bugs here and there to be fixed.
• URL rewriting has been implemented, but still needs to be configured. This means that you will no longer see those ugly URLs like “/Forum/Viewpost.asp?ID=5Page=4″, but instead see easy-to-remember URLs similar to “/Forum/Nintendo/DS/Thread123/”, and they will be ‘hackable’ meaning you can cut parts off of it in your address bar to navigate the site. For example you could go to “/Forum/Nintendo” to view the Nintendo category of the forums.
• Interactive Art Shops (commonly known as “Sig Shops” in forums) are working, again with some minor formatting issues to work out. They have an interactive requesting system, and staff is handled as well. Each shop also has its own thread to go along for discussion, and the shop staff can even customize it by writing their own CSS (you can change the colour, backgrounds and format of things)!
• The Clans feature is also semi-functional (half done), just is under heavy development at the moment. Will be finished soon!
• An automated Review feature has also been worked on in the last few days, allowing users to express their feelings about games, and others to be able to get some feedback from players of a game before buying.

Now let’s look at some of the exciting new developments yet to be done:

• Friend codes will be fully integrated into a user’s profile, and a friend system is in the works. Dynamic MPH statistics are probable in the future.
• Organized matches between users and/or clans, with helpful reminders is not far away.
• An Emblem Gallery with which you can share your emblems with others is also on its way.
• Besides the original dark theme, we’re supplying an alternate, Windows Vista inspired light theme, which is currently in the works.

So as you can see, with only a few more features to implement, we need only to fix up some bugs, make sure the site is stable, and it’ll be up in no time! My guess is that we should be ready to launch around mid-to-late February, so we’ll keep you posted. Gather your friends, feed them this info, and let them wait until we launch, and then everyone JOIN! JOIN! JOIN!

And please comment here. When the site is in development is the prime time to make your suggestions. Whatever you wish a gaming community site could have, we can make come true.

- AirHead3.0