About three months ago, we looked forward to 2019 and our plans for RPGpad. Being well into the year, I figured it might be a nice time to look back at what we said we wanted to do, how much has been accomplished and what is next on the calender.
Important Features
To mature our platform, we set out to implement many core features which we were still missing. These included locking and sticky topics, showing changes between wiki edits and reverting edits, as well as a major overhaul of the messaging system.
We also included the ability to search posts and wiki pages, including their content, which makes it far more convenient to find what you need in a pinch. With these - and many other minor features - successfully added, we feel confident in marking this as Done
Community
Allowing users to have full control over their community is important, especially for larger groups where more management is necessary than for basic table top campaigns. We added semi-protected wikipages and GM or Moderator only forums. As part of this step, we also made a major overhaul of the player menu.
Unmentioned in the original post, we also implemented player profiles both general profiles and campaign specific profiles
The only part that has not yet been added is a moderation queue. Upon re-examination, we felt that the moderation queue, while useful, was not as necessary as other features we were adding, so it was removed from our immediate task list and set to a lower priority. With that decision, this step has been marked as Done
Images
Image support livens the place up, and the first major improvements on this were already being completed at the start of the year with the addition of galleries. These are already in active use - actually, images make up the majority of our backups nowadays! Additionally, we added support for easily linking images from wiki pages or galleries.
However, we are still lacking an image upload feature for posts, and wiki pages are still limited to either hotlinking or referencing images on other wiki pages. With that being the case, we can mark this as Almost Done
Theming
This is the first feature which has not yet been touched upon. Technical support for theming has been present since the start, so this is mostly a matter of designing and implementing different layouts. Unfortunately, our main talents are software development, not design, though in this case the main limiting factor has been time.
However there is good news here as well - the first step for theming is coming in the next few weeks where we will be streamlining the current theme and improving various visual details. Those will allow us to develop different themes based on a clean template which will allow much faster development. In fairness though, this task should be labeled Open
Campaign Data
Campaign data was the last on our list at the start of the year and we will be starting the main feature - customizable data schemas - once the streamlining of the current theme has been completed.
However, we did already add automatic listings, including automatic listings for tags, and tags themselves have been given some special abilities which makes them even more useful in the management of your campaign!
I am hesitant to mark it as partially done as the main feature has yet to be started, so despite the progress we have already made, we’ll still mark this as Open.
Beyond the above, there are many other features which we have snuck in including , announcements, improvements to the page header, fancy display features like letters, sidebars and admonitions, as well as bugfixes and performance improvements.
Adding this all together, about two-and-a-half of our five goals for 2019 have been completed, and many additional features were implemented. Even if, in all fairness, we only planned out the first 6 months of 2019 in that original post, this still means we are neatly on schedule and development is going very well!
Do you have any comments or questions about our plans, or suggestions as to what we should add? Please be sure to let us know!