Well, seems my limited knowledge, money and time are pointing me to the wrong (and messy) direction...
First, and main problem: Developement isnt my field. I work mostly with support and hardware, and in fact i divert from dev some years ago, after having personal struggles in high (and also technical) school. Today develp and related is just a hobby, and most of my skills are in web design and a tiny PHP knowledge. Outside of web, i have some experience with PAWN (the language SA:MP - GTA SA Multiplayer) uses.
Back to the topic: i'm using a
cheap rented hosting, aprox. US$ 3.76/mo, which only have PHP and MySQL support. No Ruby on Rails in sight. Other hosting (with more options or space/bandwith) was considered in the past, but give my conditions, its outside of my reach.
Second, the CMS to be used: My initial idea was to serve the page using three cms: one for the frontpage (
Wordpress), one for wiki (
MediaWiki) and another for the forum (
PhpBB). I tried to minimize the need for multiple CMS searching for plugins for both Wordpress and Phpbb which allow wikis and forum/frontpages, but while wordpress only have a freemium
Wiki plugin and the very limited
bbPress (which are semi abandoned and without any documentation), PHPBB v3.1 dont have any type of portal or wiki plugins for its version, and i doubt any developer would port the
previous version MODs to current version extension system.
In fact, one of the reasons that made me re-consider the 3-module design was that there was a MediaWiki skin which uses bootstrap as base. Thus i can easily adapt some parts of the layout to give a harmonic and similar appearance across all the three CMSs. The other was the frustration of having a member who has the knowledge to feed an encyclopedia but does not have a proper place for it.
Changing the planned CMS would be a good thing, specially to use Markdown as forum syntax.
But the folks of PHPBB dont think Markdown is a good thing.
Another but annoying issue is the freemium nature of my current Bootstrap-based PHPBB style. Despite being MIT-licensed, the author refuses to add some basic compatibility with the more used plugins, and the layout isnt that good. I struggle to make significant changes (aside of the header of page) and several bugs are still present.
But, the major headache to switch for other CMS is the (in some of them) difficulty to tweak the graphical style of it, and of course the type of database/language used. If the system have easy theming and/or some free theme/style based on bootstrap (at least for reference) and whose requeriments meets what my current hosting plan offers, i can give a try.
Third, the mobile access. Most people blame my site failure to reach a pretty decent base due to this. In fact one of the issues is a tendency of people to get lazy and stick only in social networks, crippling the audience of the blog. Another are the limited bandwith for mobiles here on Brazil (since i launched the forum my cousin arent able to access it), and the demand of a standalone app for Android/iOS/WinPhone, something i dont have any clue of how develop.
Another insignificant (for this topic) problem is the haters i've collected across social networks during CM's passage there. People only consider Trigger and hate Cross, most of them because cant read english or dont know how setup propely a PS1 emulator.
Lastly, i dont have time and knowledge (as stated before) to learn a new language or platform and in a conceivable short time began building a so large and complex system. I never developed something so great, and alone i felt its almost impossible.
And hiring a freelancer are too expensive to me. But it would be a great solution.
Perharps my plan, for the present moment and future, is very ambitious but pointless, given the small (and decreasing) size of the fandom even on Brazil.
Maybe my efforts are clueless, but as i stated before, it was my dream in first place, because i always wanted to see something like this place full in portuguese to have my friends (and other fans of the franchise) keeping around the flame.
I have some friends wanting me to play other RPGs or non-RPG games and make something similar to ChronoMania, but it isn't what I want.
Well, the lesson I learn from it all is that I need to choose priorities for my community, and even for me. Getting the forum working was a hard work, but i want to improve and perfect it, and this is why i poke annoyingly brilliant people (like you all) to give me clues about anything.
Anyway, thank you so much Ramsus for the advices. And of course for keeping this site alive and rocking with Zeality for all these years. You're superb!