Platinum - Our Future Open Source Community Suite

[Christian]

Hey everyone!

 

Recently, I've been receiving feedback from users and also have been thinking about a lot of things myself.

 

As of right now, this website utilizes Invision Power Services. This is a paid community suite written with PHP as the back-end programming language. I chose this as TMC's website because I had a lot of experience with the software prior to making TMC with older gaming communities I made and you are able to create custom applications and hooks. With that said, IPS 4 is very feature-rich. However, after creating custom applications such as our future server browser along with the current website's background slideshow and fixed navbar, it is clear there are still many limitations and things don't flow greatly with the website between official IPS 4 applications (one is our current mod marketplace). Additionally, they don't officially support our web server and are moving towards cloud hosting primarily which isn't something we're interested in. Another thing to mention is finding developers other than myself willing to learn IPS 4's framework has not been successful.

 

From the feedback I've gathered, many users also feel the website is bloated and this is something I agree with.

 

In the future, we're going to be creating an open source community suite called Platinum. My goal with this is to make it as modular as possible and it will be something gaming and other modding communities can utilize themselves.

 

We will be making our own modules (or applications) for the community hub, forum, server browser, and mod marketplace. I'm not sure if we're going to make all of these modules open source/free. We may make a free version of all of the modules, but a paid version would include official support for example. All of those are decisions we will make down the line when development starts.

 

A friend of mine, @ All Ts , suggested something that I really like. Since we're already working on Best Mods (for mods), Gamecom (for games and communities), and Best Servers (for game and hosting servers), we may use Platinum as the foundation for all of these projects and have this website pull TMC-specific data from those websites via an API. This is actually really smart and that way, everything feels more connected and there is less time spent developing something separate for TMC.

 

I want to also make clear, we are going to be on IPS 4 for some time until development is done with Platinum (currently, I'm the only person developing these services). From the beginning, I feel IPS 4 has been a way for us to prototype our future long-term services. I am still planning to release our server browser by New Years since I've spent a lot of time building that application already. Unfortunately, IPS 4 doesn't allow more than one test installation, so it has been a pain trying to fully test the server browser on a clean local installation without nulling the service (just another reason to eventually move away from them).

 

I also want to thank everybody for the feedback

 

Happy holidays to those celebrating!