Content Management Frameworks
Posted March 19, 2009 at 12:38 AM by Kaelon
For the past few weeks, I have been grappling with a fascinating challenge. As I move to redesign a lot of our end-user content, how we choose to present this content -- which includes art, music, prose, poetry, and design -- is almost as important as how this content is actually stored on the Aelyria backend. Our creative process has lacked any coherent digital asset management strategy, through no fault of its own, but it is clear that as our organization matures, our creative teams will need to also evolve to support a more professional, streamlined, commercial workflow. Enter the Content Management Framework.
Content Types
All of Aelyria's content can be roughly classified into two general groupings: "Core" content, which is the bare minimum that is required to communicate the substance of an idea (about Aelyria, the world, the game, its community, etc.); and, "Supplemental" content, which provides rich detail and expounds upon core topics, but are ultimately optional. A huge learning curve -- totally unnecessary, in my opinion -- exists because new users are inundated with supplemental information, when what they need to be presented with first and foremost is the core content. What is Aelyria? How do you play? How does one contribute? What is the world like?
Over the past two years, I have tinkered with different ways of presenting Core content. Some have been more successful than others (such as the Races FAQ), while others have been experiments in failure (such as the Game forum). The end-result has been an unfortunate mish-mash of content, where streamlined core content stands side-by-side with supplementals. Furthermore, our talented and gifted writers in the Worldforge are creating beautiful writeups that are later published in the Lore forums, but there is an inherent contradiction here: the Lore forums are promoted as "Core" (recommended reading for mods and players alike), but virtually every article is supplemental.
Is it any wonder that mods feel overwhelmed when they have to research a topic to properly moderate, or that new players feel they can never get the information that they need at their fingertips?
Information Architecture
Consider also that this is a problem inherent with design. Searching for content on Aelyria is systematically problematic: does one search the Wiki? Or does one run a search on the site? Does one check out the front-page, the FAQ, or the forums? And if the latter, which FAQs or Forums should one read/search? Some great feedback on this topic was raised during the Lore Roundtable held several weeks ago, and it was clear that users want two things:
Design is both art and science, and Aelyria desperately needs a make-over on both points. In the former case, Design is supposed to cleanly and attractively present content in an intuitive and unintrusive way. In the latter case, Design is supposed to dictate how you organize and present information to people taxonomically. For over fifteen years, Aelyria's taxonomy has been built upon arbitrary categories that I more or less chose when I was a teenager: rough classifications that I thought represented broad spectrums of the world of Aelyria itself. But, in actuality, as evidenced by activity in the different Worldforge forums, not everyone views these cateogries evenly. Some categories are bursting at the seams with ideas, whereas others haven't had meaningful contribution in years. Just closing up categories isn't really the right path to take, either, because those are valid chapters of the compendium of our game world. Yet, there has to be a better way.
Design Approach
Let's consider, then, that we don't have the right tools at our disposal to adequately store and manage our data. The Lore forums are essentially prettified forums -- they are confusing to first-time users, and not really that intuitive for veterans, but yet, they serve a fundamental and integrated purpose. It's convenient because it is built right into the forums (so someone can use the general site-wide search and come up with a relevant hit). We've explored alternative frameworks in the past: from Drupal, to Portals, to Engines, but none of them really resolved the problem which is less how we store the data (though important) and more how we present and organize the content for the public to see (the critical key missing component). There simply has to be a way that we can solve this problem.
An emerging design approach is coming into view, at least over the past few days for me. It involves linking the objective of what we want to accomplish -- presenting Aelyria in very rich media layouts, integrating artwork, music, and high production assets on our site, so that it wows visitors and yet remains a critical compendular resource for our users -- with the incremental goals of long-term sustainability, regardless what content management solutions we may use in the future. This design has to support rich XHTML (which presents a new set of problems, because not every writer in our community is also a designer, but to quote a fellow management team member, you don't know what assets your community has until you solicit for them), and yet must also remain accessible so that it can breathe and evolve over time.
And yet, we have an immediate parameter set around what we must accomplish. Our site is, after all is said and done, a forum community. We post stories that people respond to in linear and hierarchical threats. Our content forms inter-nodal relationships based upon how users approach that content, link the content, and then post that content. We have a classic post-and-response dynamic that creates a naturally moderated environment on the game side, and a very organic academic dialogue, drafting-and-revision workflow that produces a strict interchange of perspectives (that may or may not be incorporated by writers) on the creative side. In the long-term, it is ultimately easier to change the creative side of this equation, because only a small handful of users actually contribute -- and thus, changes to how contributions are handled will impact a smaller population -- rather than altering the game-side of the equation. But it has to evolve to enable us to reach the goal of making the content more approachable and more designable.
So if our community is forum-driven, then the type of content that we want to present has to exist outside of the forum infrastructure. "Core" content does not really change that often; "Supplemental" content is subject to all sorts of organic revisions, because by their definition, they are supplemental. It stands to reason that the fundamental "Core" content behind Aelyria will exist on a static design platform that can make use of rich high-quality production assets (we have many talented artists and musicians in our community, whose works deserve integration on par with the written word), and that this is the sort of content that will take center stage. As for the content management framework that we use, the built-in FAQ is beginning to look like an attractive temporary repository until the forum-driven content management system is deployed by our software developers later this quarter. I will begin to tinker with this approach this week and next week to see what sort of results we can generate.
Content Types
All of Aelyria's content can be roughly classified into two general groupings: "Core" content, which is the bare minimum that is required to communicate the substance of an idea (about Aelyria, the world, the game, its community, etc.); and, "Supplemental" content, which provides rich detail and expounds upon core topics, but are ultimately optional. A huge learning curve -- totally unnecessary, in my opinion -- exists because new users are inundated with supplemental information, when what they need to be presented with first and foremost is the core content. What is Aelyria? How do you play? How does one contribute? What is the world like?
Over the past two years, I have tinkered with different ways of presenting Core content. Some have been more successful than others (such as the Races FAQ), while others have been experiments in failure (such as the Game forum). The end-result has been an unfortunate mish-mash of content, where streamlined core content stands side-by-side with supplementals. Furthermore, our talented and gifted writers in the Worldforge are creating beautiful writeups that are later published in the Lore forums, but there is an inherent contradiction here: the Lore forums are promoted as "Core" (recommended reading for mods and players alike), but virtually every article is supplemental.
Is it any wonder that mods feel overwhelmed when they have to research a topic to properly moderate, or that new players feel they can never get the information that they need at their fingertips?
Information Architecture
Consider also that this is a problem inherent with design. Searching for content on Aelyria is systematically problematic: does one search the Wiki? Or does one run a search on the site? Does one check out the front-page, the FAQ, or the forums? And if the latter, which FAQs or Forums should one read/search? Some great feedback on this topic was raised during the Lore Roundtable held several weeks ago, and it was clear that users want two things:
- A one-stop solution for Core data.
- Freedom to collaboratively create Supplemental data.
Design is both art and science, and Aelyria desperately needs a make-over on both points. In the former case, Design is supposed to cleanly and attractively present content in an intuitive and unintrusive way. In the latter case, Design is supposed to dictate how you organize and present information to people taxonomically. For over fifteen years, Aelyria's taxonomy has been built upon arbitrary categories that I more or less chose when I was a teenager: rough classifications that I thought represented broad spectrums of the world of Aelyria itself. But, in actuality, as evidenced by activity in the different Worldforge forums, not everyone views these cateogries evenly. Some categories are bursting at the seams with ideas, whereas others haven't had meaningful contribution in years. Just closing up categories isn't really the right path to take, either, because those are valid chapters of the compendium of our game world. Yet, there has to be a better way.
Design Approach
Let's consider, then, that we don't have the right tools at our disposal to adequately store and manage our data. The Lore forums are essentially prettified forums -- they are confusing to first-time users, and not really that intuitive for veterans, but yet, they serve a fundamental and integrated purpose. It's convenient because it is built right into the forums (so someone can use the general site-wide search and come up with a relevant hit). We've explored alternative frameworks in the past: from Drupal, to Portals, to Engines, but none of them really resolved the problem which is less how we store the data (though important) and more how we present and organize the content for the public to see (the critical key missing component). There simply has to be a way that we can solve this problem.
An emerging design approach is coming into view, at least over the past few days for me. It involves linking the objective of what we want to accomplish -- presenting Aelyria in very rich media layouts, integrating artwork, music, and high production assets on our site, so that it wows visitors and yet remains a critical compendular resource for our users -- with the incremental goals of long-term sustainability, regardless what content management solutions we may use in the future. This design has to support rich XHTML (which presents a new set of problems, because not every writer in our community is also a designer, but to quote a fellow management team member, you don't know what assets your community has until you solicit for them), and yet must also remain accessible so that it can breathe and evolve over time.
And yet, we have an immediate parameter set around what we must accomplish. Our site is, after all is said and done, a forum community. We post stories that people respond to in linear and hierarchical threats. Our content forms inter-nodal relationships based upon how users approach that content, link the content, and then post that content. We have a classic post-and-response dynamic that creates a naturally moderated environment on the game side, and a very organic academic dialogue, drafting-and-revision workflow that produces a strict interchange of perspectives (that may or may not be incorporated by writers) on the creative side. In the long-term, it is ultimately easier to change the creative side of this equation, because only a small handful of users actually contribute -- and thus, changes to how contributions are handled will impact a smaller population -- rather than altering the game-side of the equation. But it has to evolve to enable us to reach the goal of making the content more approachable and more designable.
So if our community is forum-driven, then the type of content that we want to present has to exist outside of the forum infrastructure. "Core" content does not really change that often; "Supplemental" content is subject to all sorts of organic revisions, because by their definition, they are supplemental. It stands to reason that the fundamental "Core" content behind Aelyria will exist on a static design platform that can make use of rich high-quality production assets (we have many talented artists and musicians in our community, whose works deserve integration on par with the written word), and that this is the sort of content that will take center stage. As for the content management framework that we use, the built-in FAQ is beginning to look like an attractive temporary repository until the forum-driven content management system is deployed by our software developers later this quarter. I will begin to tinker with this approach this week and next week to see what sort of results we can generate.
Total Comments 5
Comments
-
I'd be interested to see what you come up with.
Side tidbit: I sent a friend to the Aelyria website because he was curious about the different write-ups that I had been doing. I couldn't directly link as for some reason, my computer at my desk at work does not like to load the site. Anyways, point being, I directed him toward the Wiki and told him to look for a particular article name, and he got very lost. He pointed out that the system was really not intuitive -- it never actually told him he was in the Wiki. It didn't have the navigation flow-chart on the top like most forums and thus he couldn't tell whether he was reading the right article or ended up somewhere else entirely.
I'm still a strong advocate to somehow systemizing searching, as I think that is the biggest downfall to the current collection of data and information. It's simply hard to search for particular things. Linking relevant articles to other relevant articles is a very time-consuming thing, and even having someone dedicated to it would be a very thankless job indeed...and probably burn out rather quickly and unceremoniously.
The problem with "Start Here First" portals, sections, or whathaveyou, is that they are intimidating from the very beginning. Obviously there's not much of a way around it -- the novelty of Aelyria and the complexity of the world make it essential for any new player to throw themselves madly into in-depth information about the suns, the planet name, the races, the ages, the time, and all that.
Perhaps if it is streamlined into a single "Need to Know" packet that was small and easy on the eyes -- much like the Race FAQ. Simple facts like, "There are two suns" and "Our planet is named Telath" and "This is what is and how to do a timestamp". And then move on. From personal experience, I have been thoroughly unsuccessful in coercing friends and family into the game -- they are awestruck by the sheer amount of information and their interest dies out before they get halfway through a CIR.
That's why I always thought the "Newbie Friendly" cities designation was a great thing -- it lets new players start into the game while they're still learning the ropes with GMs who are willing to teach them and be slow and patient. Maybe that should be poked up again and made more obvious -- even a designation on the city forums themselves?
I'm wandering; I apologize. My point is, I have found the biggest hindrance to finding information is the lack of a usable search function that hits all possible sources of it. And that so much information is not written down somewhere -- which is not something easily remedied, as that simply takes dedication, inspiration, and motivation from others in order to track it down.
The biggest pitfall of the Worldforge is its reliance on others. Obviously you want your work to be critiqued and commented on by other readers. That, however, can be, in my opinion, its greatest weakness -- so many members do not feel they have the ability to comment because they either do not know enough about the subject or are intimidated by ancient start dates on the characters who write the write-ups. So the authors go without valuable feedback and can feel very unappreciated, thus killing potentially golden write-ups.
Ummmmm...I'm drifting again. Back to collection of information. Ok. I like the Wiki, but I figured that would be obvious. It's quick, it's painless, and it's a good place to store information that I'm either not ready to complete into a full Worldforge write-up or it simply doesn't encompass enough to ever get to that stage. The biggest problem with the Wiki, though, is that it is entirely reliant on self-motivation. No one else will write the Ethgan'tor book for me. I must come up with it on my own because, to be quite honest, I do not trust other people writing random articles for the city and putting them in the Wiki as cannon because they may or may not work.
The beauty of the Worldforge is that it is need-driven. Take my recent write-up on Faerie Dragons. I saw what had been written in the Wiki and what I had been recently reading in IC threads and decided that I had enough information just from my own research to do a write-up simply because none had been done before.
I have no idea what the point of this comment is. But there you go. -_-Posted March 19, 2009 at 09:08 AM by Charybdis
-
That covers a lot of familiar ground, Chary
This isn't really a new dilemma for Aelyria, there have always been issues with presenting the information in a readable, easy to find format. As the years have gone by we have accumulated guides, and readmes and information in so many forms about so many different things, it gets hard to encompass the needs of all users in a single system.
When I first started playing Aelyria, all I can really remember about the layout of information is 4 main points.
- Play Now took me to the fabled NCO, the New Citizens Orientation. It was not particularly long, and guided me through the basics of making a character, the concept of bunnying, and my possessions, and where to start.
That's it. That is all we had. Everyone checked all of those forums, all of them were on the main index of the forums, as were all the various cities. These days we tend to nest things in sub forums, because it is great for organising things and making sure they don't get lost. However it means people don't check those forums, they don't read that stuff.
- The Compendium was linked through around 7 sections, all with between 3 and 8 articles that gave basic information. Some of them are still in use today.
- There were...4 OOC forums. And that was it. These days there is a forum for evey single group, faction, thought, whatever.
You had your general 'Aelyrian General Chat', 'Ye Olde OOC Forum', 'Question & Answer', and possibly later on there was a 'Worldforge'.
- The Herald had it's own 'mini website', all you saw was a few headlines. I love that there were actual sections, it felt like a newspaper rather than a blog.
I'm not advocating turning back the clock, but I find the amount of sub forums and divisions of discussions insane. And this complexity of navigation is somewhat carried over to the Lore and Wiki areas, as well as the handbooks.
Write ups are both dependant on too many people, and too dependant on a single person.Posted March 19, 2009 at 10:14 AM by Caerydd
-
Yeah, I know.
The pain of rambling is that 90% of it is nonsensical and completely useless.
I somewhat remember the organization of the Herald being like that, but I'm not 100% sure. I have to say, though, that personally I find the index page and the forum index rather off-putting, particularly the latter. There's simply too many links. To a newcomer, it's impossible to tell where to go for help versus where to go for the game. Stuff like "Lore" and "Worldforge" should, in my opinion, be maybe one link to "Background" or "Creativity" or something.
Maybe, for the index page, do the portal-ing technique mentioned before -- OOC, IC, Creativity, and Help. And then branch off into sub-forums. I dun't know.
I also remember that there was a crack-down on subforums used in-game around the time I was in Vers. In-game they're super useful; on the main index of the site I think they're just confusing. I even get confused about where to find the Help Desk and where to find the Realmcraft forums -- and I've been here for a long time.
Honestly I would be very against cutting down the information in the Compendium. Would just be better to "mask" it, or organize it into (yes another!) handbook for "these articles are important for newer players" and "these articles are supplementary". Which I'm pretty sure was Juan's entire point in this blog post, of Core versus Supplementary...
Personally I really shy away from those labels as, in my opinion, all information is and should be core. I realise this is a personal fault...I tend to explode people with as much information as I can without restraint, which is quite often far from the best way to approach it. However, for something like Aelyria where we are literally creating an alternative universe, I really just...don't like the idea that any detail is not a "core" detail to know about this world. The monumental amount of attention to detail required to make a workable universe does, in my opinion, validate every write-up, every line, every post, etc., to ensure that every corner of the universe is appropriate and workable.
Anyways, all this to say, I would agree fully with Caery about the need to cut down on the subforum-ing and such, particularly on the front index pages. By initially confronting potential new users with super minimalist simplicity and saving the tree-branching for later, it might help streamline the entire process.Posted March 19, 2009 at 01:54 PM by Charybdis
-
just breifly to agree with chary, I'm very wary in how we apply the lables of core and suplimental. say all the cultural write ups about the races say those of the esh, to some they maybe suplimental since the race write up covers the basics, but to me, you cant play a character if you dont know the culture they come from, there wouldn't be any conection with the world your playing in then, heh I leave that sort of gameplay for D&D or the like where its module based.
to everything else, since its mostly conceptual, I have no real opinion since it all depeneds on implimentation. Though I am warry about the refrence to chagnes in the forge afecting a smaller amount of the population. While its true, you also have to be aware that while they may be a smaller portion of the population the forge tends to fall to those who have a lot of personal investment in the game and want to see it grow. Smaller group yes, but a smaller group thats very likely to feal any changes much more. And aelyria has always survived and prospered based on that small core of dedicated players who new players want to emulate or who help introduce people to the game.Posted March 19, 2009 at 06:15 PM by Dimnersti
-
Thanks for the great feedback, everyone! Like I said, this is me mostly thinking out-loud here, and I think my mind has wandered in your direction more than once.
@Charybdis:
I think you're absolutely right. The key should be to have a direct, straight-forward search process, and I think this is part design (where is our Search located, and how is it accessible for use) and part methodology (what search should we promote? where should search be highlighted), and even part organization (can we present documentation in a way that minimizes the need to 'search' for something, if you can just go to a well-known repository?). To your point, the "Start Here" portals are pretty intimidating by their definition because they can drill down indefinitely. I also don't see how a laundry list of articles (which is what the Lore forums are now) is any different. Back to the Search point, at the top of all of our pages, we have a search box. This searches the whole forums, which is great in finding documentation on obscurities, but not so great when you want to research something on a specific topic, or search through documents that all have the same level of importance or validity. What I think you are alluding to is a sense of "social searching", or "intelligent finding". What do you think?Quote:I'm still a strong advocate to somehow systemizing searching, as I think that is the biggest downfall to the current collection of data and information.
I also like the dichotomy that you present with regards to Wiki vs. Worldforge. I always thought that the Wiki would be more in-depth than the Worldforge, and it would become a true encyclopedic resource when anything and everything about the Aelyria would could be stored and improved upon, whereas the Worldforge would be much more high-level and generalistic than the Wiki -- where overview articles that are fashionably created would be solid reference materials. But part of the problem is that people love specifics -- as you point out, people get "madly into in-depth information" about our world, and so the Worldforge ends up producing hyper-specific treatises on obscure topics, rather than good general core references. I find mods and players alike then have a hard time using the Lore/Worldforge areas to get the game information that they need, and it's also a challenge for me, from a site ops perspective, to try and market and promote the world of Aelyria to outsiders by pointing them to either the Wiki or the Compendium.
@Caerydd:
This is so true. Consider that we have the duological problem with Wiki vs. Worldforge that I describe above in response to Charybdis. Then, contrast that with the still missing need for (a) a social/intelligent search; and (b) a "core" or principal set of reference materials. In your generation, the Compendium was small enough that its seven sections were sparsely populated (in fact, between 2002 and 2004, there were only around 100 total "articles" that made up the World of Aelyria - everything else was role playing and banter-talk over the Worldforge) covered everything. But fast-forward half a decade later, and here we are with hundreds of documents, thousands of Wiki articles, and numerous different views on what the world of Aelyria is. In many way, it's kind of my responsibility to figure out how to give everyone the same sort of "standard starting point" from which to dream and imagine.Quote:This isn't really a new dilemma for Aelyria, there have always been issues with presenting the information in a readable, easy to find format. As the years have gone by we have accumulated guides, and readmes and information in so many forms about so many different things, it gets hard to encompass the needs of all users in a single system.
Side tangent: that also opens up the risk that because Aelyria is many things to many people, if the standard is too specific, it will end up disappointing people with views or interpretations that might get marginalized. For example, I mention in my "Getting Buy-In" blog entry that for some people, Aelyria is a rich and colorful fantasy world. For others, it is a dark gothic universe of monsters and beasts. And yet for even others, it is a political game with dramatic plot-driven storytelling. That doesn't even count the numerous other sub-genres - like swashbuckling, and science fiction, or steampunk - to where we cross-over. All of these "versions" of Aelyria present something fun and fascinating about the world we have created; I do not want to marginalize any of these world views by trying to present a reference source.
To your point, and Charybdis' follow-up point, the top-level (index) experience, both on the site and on the forums, really needs to be simplified. I know I will likely be crucified for this view, but I really think that it needs to be dramatically reduced of links, and turned into a much more streamlined, slick, and sharp interface with brighter fonts and better colors, so that when a new person visits our site, they get it. They see what the world of Aelyria is, and then they start imagining the possibilities. We need to hook them with the beauty of our world, before we enchant them with the maddening depths of insanity that our immersive creation offers.
@Dimnersti:
Yes, it's ultimately all about the implementation. I think that Aelyria's long-term survival has ultimately not depended upon any group or individual - no matter how big or small - but has relied more upon the fundamental idea of what we are (which I discuss in my "Magic of Aelyria" posting some time ago) -- the innocence of faerie-tale magic crossed with pop-culture and multi-genre references, combined with the accessibility that anyone can contribute to this world and make it their own, and then the more that they do, the more the world is forever changed. I think whether you have 10,000,000 or just 10 people doing this, Aelyria continues as a successful legacy.Posted March 20, 2009 at 04:01 PM by Kaelon
Total Trackbacks 0
