It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally reached the point in the development of Events For Gamers and all its websites to where we can provide you a truly all-encompassing game industry event browsing experience. The features you are looking for get their full treatment right here with the newly announced website!
The Site’s History
If you haven’t visited the site before, Events For Gamers was originally launched back in 2008. Marking our 5th anniversary, it’s been through five unique iterations. The first design theme was on a custom HTML solution and had no news or forum capabilities. Suffice it to say that design didn’t last very long with its myriad of template errors and security issues.
We quickly moved on to what was at the time a very promising CMS solution – Drupal. While it took awhile to setup and tweak the template, Drupal provided a fantastic array of options to customize the site in order to provide all of the event categories you wanted. Unfortunately, Drupal was too complex for us to maintain. It often had outdated plug-ins that opened up significant security threat concerns.
The Previous Design
This brings us to the previous iteration on Invision Power Boards (IPB). Up until WordPress, this was our most promising CMS platform. A few years ago the folks at IPB decided that CMS systems were so popular, they needed to take their forum solution to the next level. They added to the forums several key CSM features that included articles, pages, commenting, etc.
The site would still be on IPB today if it wasn’t for our recent experience in working with WordPress. Between Drupal, IPB, and even vBulletin and its wide array of options, we can’t positively remark enough about how WordPress and all the available plugins brought this site to the next level. As you peruse this site and reflect on how difficult it was in the past to navigate event pages, you will see what we mean.
New Event Features
Here is a highlighted list of all the game industry event features you will want to take a look at:
- SEO optimized news section with the ability for you to submit news to us, as well as receive feeds and comment updates via e-mail
- Dynamic event calendar section with the ability to submit calendar events. Also includes a new category: Parties!
- Individual exclusive event pages that have complete customization for event coordinators to present any content they wish to reveal
- Google World Map that shows where all the events are around the globe
- Multiple Facebook and Twitter feeds to quickly view the latest hourly event announcements
- ‘Connections’ profile section to find others in the industry that you may wish to connect with (direct game and event support fields coming soon!)
- Improved ways to share social network feeds, news posts, videos, and calendar events straight to your Google Calendar!
- Built on an open CMS solution that provides robust community development
And much, much more. This is only the beginning of what we will be able to offer game industry event attendees and interested readers.
Join Our Community!
If you have any questions about the new site, find an event we do not have listed, an update to an existing event we should add, have experience working with WordPress or editorial skills and would like to help us out, please contact us!
Thanks everyone for being a part of the Events For Gamers community!
