I think Shingoki's Air Carrier screenshots look cool.
I also had a look at the mainpage after a long time and I think the link on the third party tools menu should be updated to jME Physics 2 (https://jmephysics.dev.java.net/) as most people use that now. Or at least add it…
Maybe it's just because we're submitting articles so frequently in the past couple days, but I kinda wish the main site would display more full text for the articles than the past 3.
Maybe even a http://www.dzone.com , http://digg.com , http://www.slashdot.org kind of news layout where the articles are in a big list, sorted by most recent top voted articles.
I'll do some research and see what types of Mambo/Joomla plugins exist to do something like that. This I think would work good for user submitted articles, and then maybe on top of that admins could post articles that automatically go to the top for things like new jME Releases etc.
Yeah I agree a bigger list of articles would be a better idea.
Or better yet a news forum that only people with certain permissions can start topics in and the first post automatically gets added as front page news. This would allow everyone to comment on articles as well.
I assume that would probably require to many changes.
But perhaps people have already developed plugins for Joomla/Mambo.
It looks like there is a Joomla to SMF bridge plugin:
http://www.joomlahacks.com/joomla/components/Joomla-SMF_Forum/
Which might make more sense for the jME community, instead of trying to post interesting news from the forums to the front page, we just integrate the forums right onto the front page news articles, logins and all.
When I get a chance I'll try playing around with the SMF/Mambo combo, and if it ends up being anything that is useful maybe it could be integrated into the main site.
Here's another possibility…
I can blow away Mambo install completely and install something else. I have Fantastico installed on the web server, so it's just a matter of pressing a button. All the relevant information is on the wikis and forums anyways. The biggest drawback will be losing the accounts (but they are not tied to the forums anyways, so no one really uses them).
Options I can install are:
Geeklog
Joomla
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe
Let me know what you guys think.
Joomla is a pretty good system in my opinion, but I don't see me doing much maintenance honestly so it doesn't particularly matter to me.
Mojo, I've got fantastico also on my CPanel equipped host, when I get back from work tonight/tomorrow so I can try and play around with those CMS in my "sandbox", and I'll post what I think about them.
Although I'm probably going to like the easiest one that lets me get news articles on the page the way I want, which might not end up being the best one for jME in the long term.
So it'd be nice to get the opinion of anyone who maintains a news/forum type website through one of those systems. Especially if anyone has used Mambo/Joomla and SMF together.
The best one for jme long term is the one that allows easy editing of articles and pages. So I think the two goals go hand in hand.
I got no idea what any of these things can do :P So yeah, anyone that's easy to use wins with me