What features do you want in our new ...

I'm moving slowly forward with my future plans for Pro (namely moving to a much more flexible and exciting software system instead of our fairly-good-in-a-Web-1.0-sort-of-way Discus 4.x and decent tweaked copy of UseModWiki).

Given that the answers I've had to "Can I do ... with Drupal?" from talking to developers so far have all started with "Ah, you want this module here!", it looks like we can get pretty ambitious.

So - what would your ideal co-op writing, roleplay and worldbuilding community site have? Think as big and silly as you like. Think Twine seamlessly integrated with storyboards, think how you want encyclopaedia definitions to be accessible and where from... think features for artists, think of ways we might provide supplemental material or illustrations. Think branching storyboards or other things to make storytelling easier and more pleasurable. Think of ways to use our web-based location as an advantage.

(Don't bother thinking of board .signatures; we're not having those.) :)

Also think about look and feel (I have a few ideas in this direction already): how do you want to work? What do you want to see when you log in? etc etc.

Themes is a whole 'nother issue, but I intend to have light, med and dark colour scheme options within a single, very defined look.

A selection of colour schemes sounds like a good idea.

One feature I'd like is posts automatically picking up on references in other boards. For example after the link here, there should be a link to that new post on the post it links to.

As far as the encyclopaedia part is concerned, being able to make stuff to inlcude in other pages easily would be good (y'know, like the Offwhite City Monastic Order footer you made recently).

how do you want to work?
Well, I would like a bigger text input field...

What do you want to see when you log in?
Well, asumming there's auto-login, like everywhere else, there isn't really one page you see when you log in, is there? Or do you mean something else?
FWIW, I have the "Last Day" page bookmarked, so that's the first thing I see.

A "print" view for an entire board would be nice. When I printed out lots of Random Encounter, I left the author name and post date in, but small and right aligned, to get it out of the way. And no dividing lines between the posts.

No idea if the board structure will be completely changed, but I'd like to point out that there being only one OOC thread for the changing parties under "Promenade Hall", rather than one for each board, confuses me.

I'd also suggest giving (running) co-op shorts a more prominent place, because that's where most of the activity is.

Sorry if that's all going into too much detail, but I don't know that I ever have seen a drupal-built community, and can't think of anything fundamentally new. And I don't know which changes you have planned already.

As to "for artists", I'm sure there's some or other gallery module.

Printable view: yessss. Very good thought.

And in Prom Hall there are separate OOC threads... for some reason we're just not using them. Probably the general one was the first one that one of us found?

More generally, I think a discussion tab, something like Wikipedia's "discuss this entry", for each story or inn-type board might be the way to go in future.

I plan for the distinction between story and closed (co-op, ie not "anyone can join") story to be vastly reduced. With a better organisation and layout we won't have to bother with "erk, the front page is too long and you can't find anything" problems.

There are plenty of gallery modules; it's just choosing between them, finding one that can integrate with /worldbuilding and that has the right mix of features...

Detail is lovely. Keep it coming.

Discussion tab per board sounds good, if the discussion is paginated and the link goes to the last page. ;)

Hm, maybe a way to divide a storyboard on the fly into chapters, rather than only paginating every x posts? That'd probably make it easier to look up a scene to check what happened/what exactly was said.

Gallery-wise, I'd prefer one page per image, with an option for creating themed galleries.
What I would dislike is that annoying stuff with darkening the whole page and displaying the image in the middle of it.

Regarding chapters, I'm still not sure how that will pan out exactly, but Droople organises things into 'books' with 'pages' - and I'm hoping there's a way to include an automatic or manually specified number of posts (i.e. not 1) per 'page'.

Oh, so it won't be a forum at all anymore? o_O

That depends what you mean by forum. It's a CMS, not 'just' bulletin board software.

By forum I mean something with a "Reply" form at the bottom, or a "Reply" link, that will add a post with my name and date to the end of page.

A more wiki-like thing where you edit a page to add to it I'm sure would work, but I thought you rather liked individual attribution, and it would take some getting used to.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: dude this thing is so awesome it'll show whatever the heck we want, eeee.

The whole "how to organise" stuff is a bit tricky to suggest when I have no idea what possibilities there are. X) Ehwell, you/we'll work out something.

Anything else? Tags?

Helloooo, anybody else listening? XD