Summer of 2011 z2 improvement thread
Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 9:47 am
Or winter, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere.
In the spirit of getting organized, and in maintaining some sense of momentum for fixing up z2, let's make a central wishlist of things that could be fixed in the near future! Then I guess we'll see where we are in several months.
Relatively easy:
* robots.txt: This needs to be less restrictive. We should probably do a quick audit of the files on z2 beforehand, just to make sure that we're not exposing anything sensitive to search engines.
* Fixing up metadata: T-Bone knows more about this than I do. It's mostly just keyword and description tags, if I understand correctly?
Some work involved:
* Front page content updates: Some of the tutorials are way out of date. I'd like to save the old ones because I'm a packrat, but we should make it easy for newcomers to get started with DOSBox and modern computers. Fix dead links, maybe get more people to link to us.
* New themes for main site/fora: I'm not big on this, probably because I don't like change (my current theme is z2 Classic). I do understand the appeal of the idea, though, and I think that a minor refresh of an existing theme would be nice.
Might be difficult:
* Code refactoring: It would be nice to get the top-level directory cleaned up. And get our DB configuration stuff in one place. And make our URLs search-engine-friendly. And maybe do a security audit, while we're at it.
* Upgrade phpBB: This needs to be thought out more thoroughly, because it might break a few things. It's a prominent part of the site, and we don't want to replace a working phpBB2 install with a partially broken phpBB3 install. The amount we gain from phpBB3 is uncertain.
* ZZT in a Java applet: This is a really cool idea. It might be difficult to support playing every game in the archive, though.
This is a list-in-progress: feel free to say "You forgot X" or "Y is a waste of time"!
In the spirit of getting organized, and in maintaining some sense of momentum for fixing up z2, let's make a central wishlist of things that could be fixed in the near future! Then I guess we'll see where we are in several months.
Relatively easy:
* robots.txt: This needs to be less restrictive. We should probably do a quick audit of the files on z2 beforehand, just to make sure that we're not exposing anything sensitive to search engines.
* Fixing up metadata: T-Bone knows more about this than I do. It's mostly just keyword and description tags, if I understand correctly?
Some work involved:
* Front page content updates: Some of the tutorials are way out of date. I'd like to save the old ones because I'm a packrat, but we should make it easy for newcomers to get started with DOSBox and modern computers. Fix dead links, maybe get more people to link to us.
* New themes for main site/fora: I'm not big on this, probably because I don't like change (my current theme is z2 Classic). I do understand the appeal of the idea, though, and I think that a minor refresh of an existing theme would be nice.
Might be difficult:
* Code refactoring: It would be nice to get the top-level directory cleaned up. And get our DB configuration stuff in one place. And make our URLs search-engine-friendly. And maybe do a security audit, while we're at it.
* Upgrade phpBB: This needs to be thought out more thoroughly, because it might break a few things. It's a prominent part of the site, and we don't want to replace a working phpBB2 install with a partially broken phpBB3 install. The amount we gain from phpBB3 is uncertain.
* ZZT in a Java applet: This is a really cool idea. It might be difficult to support playing every game in the archive, though.
This is a list-in-progress: feel free to say "You forgot X" or "Y is a waste of time"!