The fact of the matter is, we live in a world that wants its information in a few different forms and right away, so why shouldn’t your RPG work the same way?  Obviously Nova will email posts out if you want it to, but in addition to email, Nova also has built-in RSS feeds so you can point your news aggregator toward the appropriate RSS feed and be notified through RSS about new mission posts, personal logs or news items.  A feature like this is especially handy for any lurkers who may follow your sim but not be a part of it!

The potential for something like this is vast.  Because RSS is a standardized format, your fleet could take your RSS feed and parse through it to display your last 5 mission posts on their site, be it the fleet site as a whole, your task force, task group or whatever other delineations your organization might have.  Feed icons on the view post/log/news pages can be clicked to open the feed!

How many times did you want to find a post, personal log or news item in SMS but didn’t know exactly where it was?  If you’re like me, probably quite a bit.  We’ve begun the process of solving the issue in Nova with basic system search that’ll easily let you search mission posts, personal logs, news items and wiki articles.  Within those items, you can search by title, content or tags.  Nova will show you a list of all the items that match your search terms with links to the items.

Searching by title or content is great, but Nova adds tags to the mix to give you even more options to choose from.  Say you write a post that involves Klingons.  You can easily throw the word “klingons” in as a tag (tags are separated by commas) and be done with it.  A year later when you’re looking for all posts about Klingons, you can search for the klingon tag and Nova will pull back everything with that tag.  Of course a feature like this will take some getting used to and getting users trained to add tags, but in the end, the feature has a lot of potential for future expansion.

Right now, search is pretty simple, but that was done on purpose.  We want to see how people are using search then expand it based on what people are using it for.  Don’t worry, it’ll get more powerful as Nova matures!

You fire up SMS and go to the Control Panel to see that there’s an update available for the system.  You’re methodical about doing updates (everyone is, right? ) so you grab the update, upload the files and head over to update the database and apply the update.  Everything looks to be in good order until you get an email from one of your players telling you that they were trying to go to a page and got all kinds of errors or something similar.  Maybe they went to start a JP, did so and hit Save only to have errors thrown back at them.  You help them out, but at the same time, you’re frustrated because you just sent a news item telling people you were going to start the update.

Enter maintenance mode.

Nova now provides a means of shutting the system down while updates are applied to the system.  Using the framework’s powerful hook feature, we’re able to completely bypass the system and redirect people to the login page with a message that maintenance mode is active.  If someone’s inside the system navigating around, they’ll be kicked out to prevent any issues where people are using features while the system is being updated.  In fact, Nova won’t allow admins to update the system until maintenance mode has been turned on, making sure there are as few complications as possible during the update process.  System administrators will still be able to login and do anything normally, but all other users are redirected.

What’s even better is that the maintenance mode feature provides the opportunity to create a skinned maintenance mode page that users would see instead of the login page simply by place an HTML file in the right place.

When you’re done with the update, simply turn maintenance mode off and everyone is allowed back in to the system to use it as normal.

How many times have you been working on a joint post with someone and after a few minutes without a response wondered if they’re still online?  Or maybe you’re just a curious soul and wonder who’s online when you’re bombing around the site.  In SMS, it was a futile attempt to guess who was online at any given time, but Nova provides a quick and easy way to see who’s currently online right from the Control Panel.

Tucked below the panel at the top of the page is a small section that lists the current people who are logged in.  By default, this feature captures activity over the last 5 minutes, but that number can be adjusted in the Site Settings page to be more accurate or less accurate.  A smaller number, while more accurate, will tax the server a little more while a larger number will be easier on the server but decrease the accuracy of the list.

In addition to building this component, we’ve wrapped it into a helper so skin developers can use the feature in their templates if they want by simply loading the helper and calling it in their template file (more information is available in the Nova user guide).