Kudos to Harry, who today became the 50th registered user of the New Rampancy system since we opened late last week, in a rather unplanned and disorganized way due to an unexpected hardware failure.
The original plan, of course, had been to beta test the new site for a few weeks before foisting it on the world, but hard drive platters heed the best-laid plans of neither man nor beast. Or something like that.
The Browse archives box presents a calendar displaying the current month.
You can click on any date to display the items that were the most recent up to and including that date.
To browse different months, use the arrows to the left and right of the month name.
If you want to display all the news for a specific date but only in a specific category, add &meta=categoryname at the end of the URL.
We will be implementing a more user-friendly interface for this feature soon.
The User blogs box displays the most recent items added to the weblogs of Rampancy users.
More information on blogs, what they are, and how they work can be found in the User blogs item in the Main menu section of the Manual.
The Features box contains hard-coded HTML links to areas of the site that may be of particular interest to viewers, such as items in the Information area such as the Halo and Rampancy FAQs, the Halo Update archive, and the Bungie Webcam.
Over time other items may also be added here.
Most Rampancy themes display three forum-related boxes.
The box labeled forums contains direct links to the index pages of Rampancy's three forums: community, futuremyth, and spam.
There are also newsfeed boxes that display the most recent threads in the community and futuremyth forums. When you are logged in, each thread displays an icon to the left of the subject line. This is used for adding that item to your user blog.
More information about user blogs can be found in the Main menu section under the User blogs item.
Rampancy always displays the Account box on every single page. On most themes, it is the first box on the left hand side, although in some it may appear on the top right.
If you haven't logged in, this box displays a login form and a link to register for a new account.
Once you've logged in, it displays links to:
Drupal, the script that runs the Rampancy.net site, displays all of its content in functional items called boxes. The main area of the page usually displays a single box containing items being viewed: news stories, forum threads, or FAQ questions and answers.
However, depending on your display preferences, the columns to the left and/or right of the main area may also display multiple boxes for different functions or kinds of content, like newsfeeds.
The User account screen allows you to register for a new account if you do not have one, or to view your current user information and site settings if you are logged in.
It has three main areas: view information, edit information, and logout.
The edit information screen can also be accessed through the account settings link in the account box, which appears on all screens on the site.
The view information screen displays your username, your email address, your homepage URL and signature.
In addition, it displays two other items: Drupal ID and Jabber ID.
The Search area of the site lets you enter search terms, as well as search any one or multiple portions of the site for those key words, including user blogs, the information area of the site (FAQs, etc, referred to as book in the Search page), comments, polls, news stories and user profiles.
On the main page of the site there is also a Calendar box to browse the story items chronologically.
Also on the main page, every news story has a category or categories; clicking a category name shows recent stories only in that category.
Each content item on the site other than comments is assigned a number of points. (Currently each type-- story, poll, book) is assigned the same weight-- 1 point.
Every item submitted by a user that ends up posted on the site is used to calculate a user's rating.
Current ratings on Rampancy include roughly two thousand stories posted since the site originally opened as The Core on May 26, 1999.
User ratings are updated every hour.
A modification to include comments in the rating is under consideration.
The News feed page is one of the truly new features of the site compared to the earlier system.
The script that runs Rampancy has the ability to take almost any kind of content in it-- news stories, FAQ entries, forum posts-- and format them into an XML document that can be read easily by scripts on other site, regardless of the specific HTML formatting used on the site.
In addition, it can read such XML feeds as well. Several are currently being imported into Rampancy and displayed in boxes: Xbox.IGN.com, MythVillage, Halo.bungie.org, etc.
Clicking the reply to this post button in a post display will open a new page showing the current message and a form for submitting a reply.
At the top of the form it will display your username. If you are not logged in (browsing anonymously) nothing will display here.
Beneath that is a field for the name to display. If you are logged in, your username will appear here. If you wish your name to be displayed in the forum differently, you may change it here-- but the new name, no matter what it is, will still link back to your user profile.
In the Threaded-min and List-min indexes, only message subjects are displayed. You have to click the message subject to see the entire message.
At the top of the screen are links to the Forums page and to the index page for the current forum.
The message display screen shows the post's subject, author, the date and time it was posted, and the message body. Across from the post's author is a pulldown for assigning rating points to the post. Alternatively you can use the same pulldown in the Control Panel.
From the Control Panel you can change the settings that control the display of the forum indexes, assign a rating to a forum post or series of posts, or start a new forum thread.