Oni Mod Depot

After months of waiting, AE is back, and better than ever! Looking through the responses to previous releases, one thing is noticeable: not everybody wants the same thing out of AE. There were numerous comments about people loving one feature, but not wanting a different one. So, this release doesn't add as much new content as other releases added, but it does include a new framework and a great new program: the AE Installer.

I haven't posted any news since October, but don't let that fool you into thinking that nothing's going on. About 34 mods and tools have been added since my last news update! Now that the site represents a fair amount of the community's work (though certainly not close to all of it), I will be working to draw more people here by linking to the Depot from other sites in the community, and by improving my search engine ranking.

Not surprisingly, when I set up the site, I overlooked some kinds of mod types. Here's another one that I needed to have pointed out to me: Weapon. Let's welcome the new student to the class, kids. *clapping* I hope he gets along well with the other mod types.

This is silly, but I'm proud of it anyway: I finally got around to providing a custom favicon (you know, that icon that appears next to the address in the browser's address bar) for the Mod Depot to replace the default Drupal one. You may have to reset your entire browser cache to see it; I know I did, in both Firefox 3 and Safari. But hey, it's probably time to delete that thing anyway and start fresh.

P.S.: Yes, I took the picture. And yes, I enjoyed eating it afterward.

This is something I should have done from the start. There is now a link to "All Mods" to view every uploaded file. Now you can easily see what is already up and what isn't.

It is in fact already possible to delete uploads (one's own and other people's). See "About the Mod Depot" for details.

I had to take the site down to upgrade and add some software, as well as meeting some (very reasonable) demands as to new features. The file upload form now allows you to specify who created the mod (even if it's the same person as the uploader, you should fill in your own name), the mod's version number, and whether your mod requires the Edition installed already (for the globalization feature).

This was already pretty much in place, but since I claimed it wasn't, in my last post, I'm correcting myself. You won't see commenting available on everything (for instance, it's disabled on these blog-style posts), but it will show up for all uploaded files.

Simplici7y has a somewhat more structured, review-based commenting system, whereas this site simply allows comments. I wanted to encourage commenters to verbalize their thoughts, not to reduce them to a number of stars, and to prevent this from becoming a scoring competition.

The Mod Depot is now online! I never thought I could pull a site together so quickly; all the credit goes to Drupal's creator and its many outside contributors, for making such a wonderful system. I can't guarantee that everything will work the way it should, but without people running through the site and getting their dirty fingers all over it, I won't know if I forgot to set something up. Certainly I have a couple more features planned for the near-future: multiple language support (which is already partially enabled but not showing up...