THE BORE

General => The Superdeep Borehole => Topic started by: radioheadrule83 on September 11, 2008, 02:17:25 PM

Title: Making Wii/DS community website and could do with some help!
Post by: radioheadrule83 on September 11, 2008, 02:17:25 PM

I'm making a website called InviteMii.com -- its main aim is to create a community of Nintendo DS / Wii users, and help them overcome the lack of a friend requesting function on the system. 

I am almost a complete noob at this. This would be my first real website, so I'm looking for help. I can't pay you. The reason for that is -- I simply can't afford to. When we have a more complete version of the site, and its potential is clear, I may formally write to Nintendo asking exactly what I am and am not allowed to do when it comes to sites that use or reference their Intellectual Property. Until then, I do not want to commercialise the site with ads and incur Nintendo's wrath as sites like MiiEditor.com did in the past.


THE SITE: WORK IN PROGRESS

A quick coming soon page is at http://www.invitemii.com and I've got an early build at - http://www.invitemii.com/en/
Please take a look at it. Here's what functionality I have so far:

Registration	Registrations are linked to email addresses, so user accounts can share the same names, surnames, nicknames and even Wii Numbers if necessary. You can register with your Wii Number if you have one, and it will send a confirmation message to your Wii if you follow the instructions. With a Wii Number linked to your account the site can send you messages / notifications.
Recreate your Mii	This is a WIP and its not 100% faithful, and its a little more colourful but it will do for now. The save button is in the top right corner of the first tab (the Mii's information). I started playing around with this editor nearly a year ago, just to see if I could do it in Flash 7. The early version of flash is why you can't import/export Mii files or XML, and can't save an image of it. I think any evidence of backwards engineering the Mii format would have brought negative Nintendo attention anyway. Hats aren't changing colour atm, there may be other oversights/bugs. I'll fix this eventually.
Edit your profile.	Add personal information and include emoticons / images if you like, there are different sets of emoticons. Save a list of your favourite books/movies/tv/etc Add other info like your XBL account / PSN account / Facebook / Myspace / Youtube / more. The TinyMCE editor is replaced by a normal textbox in the Wii browser / Opera. This is because the wii can't display it properly, and Opera has a strange whitespace problem. Displaying emoticons / images will therefore require some knowledge of BBcode.
Add / remove and rate friends.	In future you will be able to make the site auto-accept friend requests, and friend requests will trigger a notification that will go to your email account / Wii system. Currently I think they only go to your email account.
Search for games, add them to your collection	The site is made so that new games aren't difficult to add for admin staff. From a games page you can see who owns the game, what popular users own it, who is online etc.
Rearrange your collection	Collections are stored as XML, so you can theoretically incorporate your collection on other sites easily in future. You can currently re-arrange the order they are in, and decide how many appear on your profile.

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DESIGN SUGGESTIONS / OVERSIGHTS / BUGS

I am not a graphic designer. I haven't designed a page before. I will welcome any page design suggestions / alterations that improve the experience. As for bugs/errors... here's some I'm aware of:

• Broken links. If there's a broken link, I haven't gotten around to that page / function yet.
• The Mii Editor is by no means finished but it will do for now
• The reason you can't import or export a Mii file from your remote, and you can't save a JPEG / GIF / PNG is that this was done in Flash 7. Its also my personal belief that the backwards engineering of the Mii files from Wii Remotes contributed to Nintendo issuing a cease & desist to MiiEditor.com, The editor (and other flash elements) need to work in Flash 7 in order to be viewable in the Wii's Opera Browser.
• It looks like ass in IE5/6 and other early browsers. I have tested this to some extent in IE7, FF2+ or Opera 9. I need Safari testers.
• Home page is placeholder. Final thing will have more info / won't have that lame flash piece.
• Registration uses a flash applet. Will be changing that to a normal, quick-loading HTML page before its finished.
• The "join now" page is placeholder as well
• Forgot to include "remember me" on the login box. Can be added easily. So if you get logged out, and find it annoying, I'll change that soon sorry.
• Private messaging isn't in yet. I'm working on it. Will have option to send messages directly to Wii systems.
• Currently you can only look at a friend's friend code by visiting their profile and clicking a game. I am doing a WIP function that - assuming you've made friends on the site - will allow you to swap friend codes for a particular game, remind someone of your friend code or enable you to schedule / organise an online game. The reason I'm not just going to give users an overview of every friend code for every game for every friend that you make is because games have addressbook limits. You could theoretically make hundreds of friends on a site like this, but you're not gonna want all of them to add you in Mario Kart.
• The lightbox stuff (when it fades to black and there's a dialogue box) is a bit ropey. If you mess about long enough you can make the dialogue appear without the transparent black background. I can fix that, just haven't got around to it yet.
• There may be other bugs. I'd appreciate any help in finding them.

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ROLES YOU COULD PLAY

If you can code in PHP / JS you could help me clean up my pages or even redesign them.

If you're any good with MySQL you might be able to check / optimise my queries.

If you're just interested in joining - you can help me test the site as its made, and I can look into giving some of you admin privs (add new games via the admin panel as they come out, check user-flagged content, ban users - POWAAA).


Anyone up for it?[/list]

Title: Re: Making Wii/DS community website and could do with some help!
Post by: demi on September 11, 2008, 02:35:28 PM

design nitpick - make the text in that gay flash box DARK

Title: Re: Making Wii/DS community website and could do with some help!
Post by: Beardo on September 11, 2008, 02:36:23 PM

IS the website called Broshnat.com

Title: Re: Making Wii/DS community website and could do with some help!
Post by: radioheadrule83 on September 11, 2008, 02:51:25 PM

Quote from: demi on September 11, 2008, 02:35:28 PM

design nitpick - make the text in that gay flash box DARK

Yeah like I said - "Home page is placeholder. Final thing will have more info / won't have that lame flash piece."
Just try to ignore that for now. Likewise, registration will just be HTML in future as well.