It took a lot of work, and a couple of missteps, but the new Podtacular.com is now live!

Hosted by Foo Mo Jive, Podtacular started in July 2005 as an unofficial podcast discussing all things Halo 2, including game tips and strategies, interviews, custom gametypes and the Xbox Live community.

Having originally built the site on the e107 publishing platform, there were problems from the start, with everything from the templates and structure to the constantly-changing core (which is still in development). This caused a couple of nasty problems to show up in the course of developing the site, so I had to back out and look for an alternative. I just couldn't risk building what I hope to be a great community site on a faulty foundation. I didn't want it to fall apart at any given moment.

So I moved everything over to the CivicSpace platform, which runs on the Drupal "engine." As it turns out, CivicSpace is built almost entirely around the idea of a community site. So it's well equipped and well-developed for web standards and an organized site structure. And then there are all of the plugins, also called "modules," that extend the CMS even further. The level of configuration within it all is staggering and at first, a little intimidating, but for standard users, I think it'll be a comfortable fit.

So if you're into Halo 2, Xbox games or just online gaming in general, check it out. I'm even scheduled to appear on the next podcast sometime soon!