Back in July, I asked a question on the AresMUSH Forums: “Can Ares replace parts of a game wiki?”
The answer, pretty clearly, was “no”. Ares could not replace parts of a game wiki. Quite understandably, people did not want to have to go between two different websites to view a game’s information.
I soon realized that if I wanted the web portal to be successful, it would have to replace the entire game wiki.
So now it can.
You can see it in action on the Demo Web Portal.
The scenes, character gallery, actors list, census, etc. are all drawn straight from the game’s database. No more needing to update your character’s wiki page just because you had a birthday or got promoted. No more log cleaning or entering [[logIcon Faraday]] wiki junk to create a scene log. You can customize your web portal profile too, either from in-game or from the web portal editor.
The wiki operates like one would expect, allowing you to create and edit pages. So far it just has what I consider essential features. It can’t do everything that MediaWiki or Wikidot can do, but it can do a lot – dynamic page lists and markdown extensions that make it easy to adapt from Wikidot.
There’s still a lot of work to do, but I’m happy with the direction it’s all going.