SaintsIan, not sure about you, but do you get lots of requests from these guys to help them out with coding a website? I at least get two people a day from here that add me on MSN and ask for website help/or to make them a website lol. Most recently one asked if I was as good as you =P
2 people a day? Oh wow, that is a lot! I get a few occasionally mainly through PM, IM or email but I wouldn't say it is "lots".
I'm pretty sure that last bit isn't true though :O If anyone contacted you, I'm certain they should know a lot about your impressive background. I don't think a comparison is appropriate here.
ANY decent web-developer in this section is asked to create websites for servers. Examples would probably be Ian, You and a few others. More over so, there are only a handful that bother even attempting to create a regular website with information being modified through the scripts in which the website is supported by. I'm not going to point any fingers or call any names out but there are many rip offs of things that certain webdevelopers have done. Such as Hyperion being copied by Sublime-Engine and Ingenious-Wire (All in all the same design, and basically says the same thing on the front-end of the website) and i'm pretty sure more are coming back.
On the point about Hyperion, I would like to make it clear that unlike the "rip offs" I did not in any way build it solely for the purpose of being used by game servers such as MapleStory private servers (anyone that tracks my Github should know this). I would say it is more of an intertwined web framework based on libraries I love that can be applied to any situation. Unfortunately, I highly doubt this is the case for the other "engines".
>Show that you have a bit of knowledge on how to create websties
>Get your MSN Spammed (unless no one has it) of people asking for websites.
The latter can be helpful in developing your web development experience and problem solving
There are certain individuals in this community that consider a 75 dollar website expensive yet they're expecting quality. I'm going to have to agree with Ian that people are expecting a bit too much for such a low price of 75 dollars. (In this case, they're expecting a decent website with a decent back-end) for a price as low as 75 dollars when it can probably go for a more expensive price.
^^ QFT
Why is the community dying?
As Ian has pointed out, there is basically no one (Aside from a good few individuals) who attempt to create "CMS"'s , nowadays it's a webdesign with everything done in css and then ripped scripts from websites that have been released (such as cype, or altair). There are only a few individuals who are willing to
1. Create their own scripts
2. Even start learning anything website related
I think I much prefer individuals to modify existing scripts rather than to create websites from ground up (when they first start). It's the same way I learned and avoids a possible risk of ripping stuff from other people blindly. Also, every new web developer in this decade is Ducking lucky. They have the benefits of hundreds of resources that never existed when I first started. Heck, when I worked on one of my first few websites, I didn't even have jQuery to carry out XMLHTTPRequests lol...
Reason why they cannot be bothered to learn any sort of webdeveloping, would have to be of the fact that they find it useless. I have Java-Developers/Source-Developers telling me that Webdeveloping won't be helping me in life (When in reality that's probably a good spot to start earning money from) and that learning Java, and all these game-programming languages would probably help me more.
I dislike going into the whole "community is dying" topic but I think it is equally due to complacency. I was pretty complacent too when I first started web development and only limited my scope to PHP since it felt the most comfortable to me. It was only after a while that I decided to step out of my comfort zone. Everything you learn will help you one way or another and it's good to build a body of knowledge of best practices from each language (or framework) you meddle with.
Again, they see web-developers as a lesser being. Nowadays, people are encouraged to learn how to program in Java, c++, c# and others whereas PHP and so forth is considered "noobish" and "easy" or so to speak. (Hence the reason the websub section of the Maplestory Development Community is dying, lack of encouragement from developers to do so)
Python is easier than PHP /inb4pythonfanboyskillme.
With that being said, PHP is quite a
rubbish scripting language lol...
However, I'm going to disagree with Ians point on how other Private-Servers web development is significantly different from Maplestorys. The next biggest sub-section for a game is probably Habbo, in reality their websites are essentially the same with people taking PheonixCMS (I believe that is what it is called) modifying the skin, and/or small parts of the code and releasing their own website and naming it "BlahBlahCMS" or something similar. However there are probably more websites in Habbo-Hotel that resemble a CMS, as opposed to Maplestory. Cype was a minor example of how a CMS would work, and Cype only lasted for a year or two before it died because of the lack of development and because these "better" designs were coming out.
All in all, DECENT webdevelopers are so scarce for Maplestory Development that people treat them like upright gods when they see them because of the fact that there are such a small amount of them.
Maybe my expressed views may be slightly biased but my point was mainly based on the Ragnarok Online (RO) community which I was a part of prior to MapleStory and the WoW community. Both of which I believe are much
larger than Habbo.
Also, I'm pretty sure you will find a lot more USEFUL web releases in the Habbo section than in the MapleStory. There are a lot more addons and modifications.
Additionally, I don't think it's fair to compare websites for a browser-based game with that of MapleStory. You are dealing with different niches here. I don't think it matters as much that the design for Habbo websites do not deviate from one another. This might just be a positive factor.
Cype's decline is also due to the coding itself. It lacks proper organisation to make its code extensible or maintainable (the template system is pretty inadequate too) in the long term - I don't think a long-term roadmap was planned for Cype in the first place. Because of that, it is simply not worth continuing its development. A complete overhaul should be carried out instead. Indeed, the developers considered working on "Cype 2", a successor to the legacy Cype. Don't get me wrong though, I respect both the main developers of Cype.
Yep, I agree with most of your points. But maybe you should show off. I consider you to be one of the more experienced web devs in the Maple community, and you're definitely sort of an inspiration(?) for me. Take your Wordpress site. I've been wanting to do something with Wordpress for quite some time, and after I saw you do it, I thought "Hey, I'll give it a shot!"
Damn... I can't find the right words for this but thank you I guess :S I'm honored that you consider me as sort of an inspiration. I'm not too keen on showing off because I don't consider the stuff I make brilliant (sometimes I look back with disgust at my old work #truestory). I too have my own source of inspiration and idols. There's a lot I have to learn but I'm far from good :\
I may consider myself a pro the day I am able to answer every web related question on StackOverflow with ease lol...
I don't really consider myself to be good (or even decent) at PHP, so I'm not doing all that great with it. But what I'm getting out of it is more important than creating a site for a MS private server.
That last point
- If you want a quality CMS that can do ANYTHING that's better than these so-called "CMS"es, be prepared to cough up some cash. I'm not interested in being staff on your server, even if you made me co-admin, I could care less.
^^ QFT
- Web developing is extremely easy to learn, especially if you already know another language. I never took any courses or classes for what I can do today. I started out doing it for fun, and the way I taught myself is from someone else's code. Take a look at CMS's like Cype, learn how it works. Break the site, then try to fix it.
^^ Excellent tips.
Also, Kudos to your determination. I must also agree that developers don't see the bigger picture. "Web Developing is useless for you" , where as It would actually probably help me get into a great university (In which I'm already at a pretty nice one), and where I can probably do it as my future job. Ian did that Wordpress thing and I was REALLY impressed, however I couldn't understand a lick of the Wordpress Codex (I've looked at the whole thing, and I personally am a visual learner so I'm going to need say.. visual examples to show me how it's used, how it works and so for) If it's straight reading from text, I won't understand it until I start doing it myself (That's how I usually learn, read tutorials, watch tutorials and then I replicate it, and use it in different circumstances/websites/scripts)
I might be going off in a tangent here (I probably already did...) but Wordpress Codex isn't the best place to get help haha (tip of the day!)... it's useful if you want a quick browse through their API to look for possible action hooks and filters you could use or perhaps refresh yourself about their interface. I believe an understanding of its core is fundamental (e.g. the request flow). Also, the Tuts+ community created a new site just for Wordpress related articles. It's brilliant. Too bad I only discovered it after I created my plugins and themes :\
Sorry I didn't reply to everything. If there's anything you would like me to respond to, let me know.
