#phoenixdex

Why, whatever do you mean? There's definitely a birthday update for the Phoenixdex! And it's definitely been there since yesterday, for sure, yep, absolutely.

...yeah, no, you got me. Truth is, I was trying to have the (very small, lots of other things commanding my attention these days) update ready before midnight yesterday—and let's be honest with ourselves, most of my birthday updates are "before midnight" in a timezone several hours later than mine—but then just as I was finishing up the revamps I realized klaitning had played a very naughty April Fool's joke on me and did not actually look the way I wanted it to. I had to call it a night and try a different approach to the design at a more reasonable hour, just so I was sure I'd actually be satisfied with it. But it's there now, along with a new humbuzz as well! I can only hope that this humble offering, delayed though it may be, is just enough to appease the fates and keep the Phoenixdex limping along for another year. I'll even share the art here, too, as part of my desperate groveling for forgiveness from the timeline:

I'm doing a forumventure on the Thousand Roads forums, and to prep for the next update I wanted to do a sketch page. (it's gonna be just a demo venture, but I wanna get my art practice in where I can)

Gastrel is a fanmon from The Phoenixdex by @phoenixkratos

Solberon

ahhh, thank you so much! Really glad to hear you enjoyed the update and the new legendaries. I was excited to finally have the time to sit down and put them together properly! There are probably a few other things that will get added/adjusted down the road, but I'm pleased with how they turned out and hope it won't be another five years before I have a chance to get to some of the others, heh.

And good eye on the dex entries! The different perspectives on them (which would indeed flip-flop depending on the "version" you were playing) and different opinions about whatever apparently happened are something I'm looking forward to playing with.

I’ve loved this project for so long and can’t wait to see how it continues to develop. The care you put into your settings is amazing, and your Pokemon designs are absolutely mental.

(Sorry for the delay in responding!)

Hi!

The Phoenixdex website is custom-coded, built on top of the ProcessWire PHP framework. ProcessWire and frameworks like it are great for building full-on database applications, but a project of that scope is usually way beyond what most people are interested in when they just want an easy personal website for showing off their fakemon stuff. I only bothered building all that myself because I work with web design and development as my actual job and it's a hobby I've had for a long time, so it used a skillset I happened to have already.

You can always go the same route if you either have or want to learn the same skills, but if you're not yet familiar with coding for the web, be aware that you'll need to obtain hosting for your site, and to learn about databases and the programming language/frameworks of your choice. (If you are curious about this, let me know and I can share some resources to help you get started/see if it's something you're really interested in!)

The much, much easier route is to sidestep all that and create a wiki-style site for your project. This is what I did before I created the fully-custom site, actually! (Although I still used my own hosting and made a few modifications, because again that is adjacent to my job/hobby and also I am a nerd.) This gives you a website that's nice and searchable but is also much easier to put together pages for than needing to learn full HTML or some kind of templating language and database APIs or whatever. It would basically be making your own custom Bulbapedia.

Most people used to recommend Fandom/Wikia for this, but there are a lot of awkward limitations and obnoxious ads and policies and it's probably best to stay away from all that. It looks like Miraheze ( https://miraheze.org/ ) is the big not-crappy wiki farm these days. I haven't used them myself so I don't have any personal experience to share about Miraheze as a host, but as I understand it they run a pretty straightforward version of MediaWiki (the same software created for Wikipedia and used for sites like Bulbapedia) so there are plenty of guides and resources out there for learning to use and customize it without Fandom's janky corporate nonsense confusing things. It's even possible to lay things out in the same format Bulbapedia uses, if you're interested in that and up for learning a little bit about MediaWiki templates, but that's far from necessary—you can just put your fakemon info, or trainer or move or whatever you're making a page for, onto the page in whatever format's easiest for you.

You can see an example of a fangame wiki made using Miraheze + MediaWiki on Pokémon Flux's wiki here: https://pkmnflux.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page They've opted to use a Bulbapedia-like layout for their content as well.