F1 Rivals Development

The end of yet another week and this is the report back:

1. I installed the bbPress Tweaks plugin, which amongst other minor things, ensures that html tags are closed in posts.
2. I tested the Allow Images plugin, decided it was fine, installed it on the live forum, and found it broke editing other posts. Maybe I should be more thorough in my testing. Anyway, I tweaked the tweaks plugin to allow images.
3. I installed the Polls plugin after testing and have not yet found how that breaks any functionality.
4. I installed the BBCode plugin, and it works. What I really want is the plugin to convert html back to bbCode when editing posts. This will eliminate a bunch of other problems too, and is something I plan to work on right after I’m done with…
5. I’ve started work on a My Friends (although here it will be My Rivals) plugin. This will allow you to set other forum users as your friends and see them on your profile page.
6. I’ve updated the home pag. It looks a little better now, and is moving towards what I have in mind.

In the next week I intend to finish the My Friends plugin and also get a feed from the Formula 1 group on Flickr to replace the static set of images on the home page.

Parts of the forum still feel like a blog, but I guess that can be expected with a site that’s a little over 2 weeks old and has had virtually no advertising. With the Formula 1 season ending next weekend, it’s not going to get better anytime soon either. But the point of starting this project now was to get things ready for next season, not to have an instantly successful Formula 1 website. Still, if any of my 3 readers have ideas, even ideas that can’t be implemented straight away, any ideas, for driving traffic to the website, please let me know.

Things are beginning to happen. Just a week ago I was giving away my precious credit card details to pay for hosting and domain names. Since then, this blog has appeared, a forum has been set up, the front page has been updated with live feeds and a count-down to the next GP, an IRC channel has been set up, and a Live Chat page has been created. Not bad for a spare time project.

The forums are running bbPress, which I chose because I really, really liked how clean and simple WordPress (the software that powers this blog) is, and figured that it’s likely that bbPress is equally impressive. The downside(s) to this is (are):

1. bbPress is pre-version 1 software, although the first alpha of version 1 is available
2. bbPress does not have all the features of the better know forum software out there
3. bbPress does not use bbCode that most forum users are so used to

The upside, however, is that bbPress, like WordPress, is very easy to extend with plugins. bbPress does not come with Avatars, or Sigs, yet we have them. And so, I am investigating the following plugins which I will hopefully have installed in the next week:

1. A bbCode plugin
2. A forum polls plugin
3. A plugin which allows the use of images
4. A plugin which tweaks bbPress and fixes some minor “bugs”

Enough about the forum. The home page has been updated with news feeds from the Official Formula 1 website and Planet-F1, one of the bigger Formula 1 news sites out there. The intension is to ultimately allow users to customize the home page in a way similar to iGoogle. In the mean time, the feeds can be refreshed and more (or less) stories can be fetched for each.

Finally, the IRC channel is where a few of us (so far) get together to chat about F1 and other junk. If you don’t have an IRC client you can still join the live chat using the Java IRC client. Just choose a nick and click “Start Chatting”
I must thank Jahn (Apoc) for creating and managing the IRC channel and his help in testing the forums; and Ryan (youknow) for his help in setting up the Live Chat page and writing the count-down script.

First of all, Welcome to the F1 Rivals.

So what is F1 Rivals then? F1 Rivals is a personal project of mine. I have been an avid Formula 1 fan for many years. My good friends and I play one of the dying breed of Formula 1 tipping games, and I’ve been saying for a couple of years that we should create our own. So that’s what I’m doing.

F1 Rivals will be a Formula 1 prediction game in the vain of the dead or dying nutting and tipping games. I will be developing the game over the next couple of months to launch in time for the 2008 season.

But I want F1 Rivals to be more than that. I want to build a bit of a social site, Web 2.0 if you will. The forums are the start of that, and I will extend that with new features, additional web toys, downloads and other things. It’s a bit of an experiment, and I would appreciate your feedback and ideas.

What you are reading now is the development blog. I will use this blog to post about future upgrades, details of things I am building for F1 Rivals, and so on. As you can see, as of right now there’s a lot of work to be done. The first thing I need to do is find or create themes for the forum and blog, I need to finalize the logo, and I need to add various features (maybe signatures and avatars for a start) to the forum.

In the mean time, I have created a couple of threads in the forum. Why not sign up and start building the F1 Rivals community?