From WikiTemp, the GBAtemp wiki

The GBAtemp Portal serves as the home page of the site. It can always be accessed by clicking the "Home" button in the Navigation bar at the top, or by going to https://gbatemp.net/. The features of the page have changed over the years, but in general it shows the latest news and reviews, latest discussions, occasionally a portal poll, and the Shoutbox (members with >100 posts only).

Original Version

The original portal was a custom design made especially for GBAtemp. It was capable of listing the latest releases (back then for ROMs that were also hosted here) and the latest news. Every release got its own, separate box, so the page could get rather long at times when a lot of releases came out in a short span of time. This version of the portal was kept as the home page when the IPB forums were added.

2008 Redesign

On January 7 2009, the second version of the home page was introduced[1] (it is called the 2008 design, as it was made in 2008). Most of the general look and feel of the old portal was kept, but the releases blocks were all merged into one single block that dynamically loaded the releases through JavaScript. Members were also able to customize the look of the portal through their user settings.

2010 Redesign

A third design of the portal was released on June 14 2010[2] in preparation for E3 of that same year. The new layout was designed to fit more articles on less space, but also introduced new features, like the top 3 articles on the top and a like/dislike system. This version of the portal could also be customized, including the amount of news to be shown, and whether the releases box should be above or below the news box. This version of the portal was kept when the forum was updated to IPB 3.2 in October 2011.

2012 Version

On October 29, 2012, when the site relaunched on the XenForo platform after recovering from being hacked, the old portal layout was no longer available. Due to the limited time the staff had to port the site over to the new platform, it was opted to use the XenPorta v1 addon for XenForo. The page showed only the latest news items, all in their own separate block. A little while later, after the review center was re-added to the site, a box for the most recent reviews was added at the top of the page. This block also showed the latest scene releases from the partner site NFOrush, which was created by a GBAtemp member after the site itself stopped providing a release list.

2015 Version (current)

On May 30, 2015, the latest version of the portal was released alongside GBAtemp V5[3]. This portal was once more a custom-built page by the site. It features a more modular design, with various blocks of content are shown in a grid layout. The portal was designed to be fully dynamic, and as such blocks can be added, removed or rearranged by members to fit their needs. Some of the individual blocks, like the news block, allow for additional customization. One of the other design goals of the page was to improve the general performance. In order to achieve this, the portal uses multiple layers of caching, and can cache individual blocks independently of each other.

Screenshots

References

  1. ^ New Portal Layout!
  2. ^ GBAtemp now ready for E3!
  3. ^ GBAtemp V5 is online!