User blog:Krayfish/Overview of Omniverse Nexus Site

Here is a detailed overview of what the new site is going to look like.

Structure
The Omniverse Nexus will be organized as a wiki farm. Each wiki will have their own subdomain as well as their own distinct colorings and background to get you in the right editing mood. For example, Galactic Crucibles will fall under gc.omniversenexus.net and will have a blue and gray color scheme, while Erudite Tales will go under et.omniversenexus.net and have a green and brown theme. In each wiki, you'll share one account across all of them just for convenience.

Each of the wikis will have their respective content and pages. Just like with GC Wiki, there will be a story namespace (Ex: Story: Title of Story) to keep track of all the narratives. Everything within them will be written in-universe.

The Omniverse Nexus Wiki on the other hand will function as a central hub and written in an out-of-universe style. It will contain all of the writing guides in one place, such as storytelling, scientific accuracy, writing for fantasy, etc.

List of subdomains
Since these are all separate wikis, they'll also need their own logos. Because of how similar MediaWiki is to Wikia, we should even be able to use a lot of the same code to make it look like the originals.
 * et - Erudite Tales - Green and brown, natural colors
 * gc - Galactic Crucibles - Light blue and dark gray, soft and cool colors
 * ha - Heroic Ages - I'll leave this to King
 * hw - Hallowed Worlds (working rename for Hallows Maleficent) - Black and orange coloring, like Halloween or horror.
 * ih - Infinite Histories - cyan and black
 * mc - Miraculum Chronicles - ethereal pink, geometric and rigid
 * mg - Myth Galaxy - Black and green like old school computer monitors
 * tos - Tapestry of Stars - dark red and orange like Mass Effect 2's colors

Presentation
With the Wordpress site, the original intent was to have all the content as professional, ready and finished to go. I believe the reason this fell through was just the overall lack of progress towards this when we are still constantly refining and improving our stuff. So the new site is going to have the same premise as the wikias - an open editing area where new users are welcome to join, and the more intuitive layout of MediaWiki will help facilitate this.

The same rules for copyrighted content and images (uploading currently disabled until I get some measures to counter the upload of malicious files) apply although the rules are going to be a tad more strict. There's going to be greater enforcement on proper licensing since this is our own site.

Adminship
We've never really had any problems with leadership hierarchy so I'm not overly concerned about this. Adminship will be given out to users as needed. That is, if we require extra people with the ability to delete articles or block users, then we'll grant more admin powers.

Also, depending on how big things get, we may need another person to have access to the server files although in the near future, I don't believe this will be necessary. However, if you have any PHP or HTML coding examples to submit, you can always send them to me via GoogleDocs so that I can put them on the site.

Licensing
Since this site is our own, we have the opportunity to set our own license when it comes to content. Since multiple authors are working on this site, I want the licensing to be a consensus decision so that we're all on the same page. We should be able to answer questions like this:


 * Should we allow others from outside the Nexus to use our work?
 * Should we allow content in the Nexus to be adapted for commercial use?

Other features
Here are some of the features to be added:
 * A global chat system across all wikis
 * A featured article system - one for stories and another for regular articles
 * Bots to clean up articles

Migration procedures
Before we move everything over, we're going to have to sort out which articles are getting moved over and take the opportunity to fix any story inconsistencies.

GC and MG
GC and MG will have their own separate wikis. Vernietigen in the GC continuity needs to be renamed as he is a completely different character essentially. (Maybe just VERN in all caps?)

Myth Galaxy will likely receive the oldest articles as well as any articles that seem fantastic in nature. Everything related to the oldest drafts of Dark Prophecy, the Titans, etc. Everything else would go to Galactic Crucibles.

I can see virtually all articles getting ported over since both universes are intended to be gigantic and vast with numerous planets and locations. In both universes, most of the story plots are planned, but they just await actual writing.

Erudite Tales
ET has a lot of old articles, so I'm not entirely sure if they should all be ported over. I would recommend doing anything related to the Polvora storyline first then work our way towards the older stuff.

Infinite Histories
I don't really make edits there, so I'll leave this to Robbo, Psi, Maj and anyone else that edits it.

Tapestry of Stars
I'll leave this one to Suppy.

Hallows Maleficient
For Hallows Maleficient, I was thinking of renaming it to "Hallowed Worlds" since the genre shift moved it away from exclusive horror. As for its connection to Project: Light World, I'm keeping articles relating to it rather sparse as things can change about it. However, articles about other dream worlds are perfectly fine.

Heroic Ages
I'll leave this one to King.

Miraculum Chronicles
All the articles from ET that have the MC label will be ported over. There's not that many of them so it shouldn't take long.

Our affiliates
Once we get everything operational and working, should we invite some of our affiliates to join the site? This might help ease in future potential crossovers and help the Nexus grow even further, although my only real concern for this is that it might be a good idea to concentrate on having a small number of developed settings, so the creation of new wikis will be fairly limited unless we can think of something totally fresh and new to add.

If all else fails, we can always continue with how we've been setting up affiliates and link to the wikias from the Nexus.

How you can help
Any tips on HTML and PHP are welcomed as I'll admit that putting together MediaWiki is something that I'm learning as I go. Also, any and all feedback as to what the site should like is welcome.

Current immediate issue
I'm currently having some trouble setting up the wiki farm. Personally, I've found the how-to guide and MediaWiki to be somewhat unclear, specifically how to have the wikis share some of the same data files to have common features everywhere. I did try to set up GC Wiki already, but it glitched out and labelled articles in Omniverse Nexus incorrectly.

If all else fails, we could just have all of the articles across all settings on one wiki, but that would be pretty unorganized in my opinion (and we wouldn't be able to have custom backgrounds for each setting either), so I'm going to continue trying to get the wiki farm working. If anyone has any advice on this, that would be awesome.