So this sprint, we have been mainly tying up loose ends with the profile pages, and various business tweaks which wouldn’t make a good ‘Letters from the engine room’. So I thought I would talk a little about our CMS behind Green Man Gaming and what it allows us to do.
CMS stands for Content Management System. It is essentially an admin that allows you to create new pages for visitors to see. With Playfire if we want to add a new page, we would need to spec out what we wanted, get the design team to design the page, and then code it in good old HTML and Python views.
With our new site, our content team are able to add any page they want, specify the url and it is immediately available for you to go and visit. When I create my fresh page I get something like this.
The formatting of the footer isn’t quite right in this view but when it’s published it will look great. At the top of the graphic you can see our content team can create a new block. So what is a block? Well if you look at a web page, it is generally split up into blocks of content. You may have an image or you may want to drop information about a game.
Looking above, you can see I have highlighted some of the blocks on our homepage. You can have block within blocks, which as we discussed last sprint allows us to do more complex layouts. Blocks do have to be developed by the development team, but once they are created our content team can put them wherever they like. We also have general blocks to add images and plain text.
So with our new page, we drop in our new content and it is available to be viewed. This allows our content team to quickly create pages for you to view without having to wait for our dev team to make the pages.
That’s about it for this the Letter from the Engine room. If working on our new community is interesting to you and you know c#, why not send us your cv to jobs@greenmangaming.com as we are currently looking for more talented developers. If you would also like to BETA test out new features then please email rob.bunce@greenmangaming.com.
