[Imperial Historian]

In light of the success of the recent Art Contest, we're going to let you have the chance to create a front page for the malazanempire.com website, as you have probably observed it has been neglected for some time, and since progress on a replacement has stalled for the moment, we're giving the members a chance to see what they can do.

What we would like you to design is a front page, using original art or modifications of the cover art from any of steves books, don't use an image in copyright as we don't have the money to pay for anything like that . The page should feature a prominent link to the forums, a short intro section describing what the site is about, a news/announcements section for the mods to post to, and any links you feel necessary (though we're going for a strict rule of if a link doesn't have a full page for it, don't do it, we've learnt from last time), since a large amount of the possible links are already up on the wiki, feel free to direct links to this location.

Your free to suggest any other features you'd like to see.

The prize for the winning entry will be a signed copy of the kaubelain and broach anthology kindly provided by PS Publishing (if two people want to work together, one doing the webpage coding and one doing the art I'm happy to give away my signed copies of the three books seperately, but you'll have to sort out who get's what among yourselves ahead of time), and the pleasure of having their work displayed, and the winner will be chosen by SE from the entries those of us at the BBQ select.

The deadline for entries is the 11th July, we'd like a working link for us to look at to judge properly. Good luck.

Submit entries and ideas here

[Theoderich II]

I certainly would use a content management system like Drupal or Joomla. Not that complicated stuff like Typo3 (it simply takes too long to get reasonable results).

The big advantage of this method is that almost no coding work is needed, at least none of that PHP and database stuff. The CMS takes care of that all. All you need is one person (site admin) who is familiar with the system and someone else (or the same person) who knows a bit Photoshop/GIMP, HTML and CSS. Unlike creating websites from scratch you'd need only skin your website. Creating a Joomla skin for instance takes about 20-25 hours. At the same time the other person could already write content and set the desired options and if everything goes well the website could be online in 4 days (like I did it with my website )

The website would be dynamically generated (with or without caching) and you could have hundreds of page/articles, links, menus, modules and or what ever.
For example you could use Joomla's built-in banner system to randomly show the newest novels on the front page (or other ads). A powerful article/news system with integrated RSS generator are on board. External RSS feeds could be used to display content dynamically. When the source (blog or website) changes the article it's automatically updated on the website as well. We actually used that for ModCraft. The feature list is much longer but I think you've got the idea. Moreover, if you have some code monkeys on the board who know PHP you could easily create your own modules and plug-ins which suit your needs.

Of course doing backups on a regular basis (or at least when major changes are made) is vital for the survival of your website, but that goes to much into detail at this stage.

I can't wait reading the ideas of the others.