Alright, so I always wanted to have a
Family Tree feature, since it's something many other prominent pet sites are lacking (and its always so tedious to have to do all that research yourself). Abronsyth actually asked on the forums for some help on how to achieve this - and it's a two part adventure that I'd already half started so I'm glad I was given the opportunity to finish.
When pets are bred, you have to keep track of the parents and the parents must be given a record of their babies. After a few generations, this'll flesh out nicely. You need to be able to pull that information and design a pleasing way of displaying that information. I don't want to go into too much detail and I'm not here to provide an official mod for this feature, but if you want to give it a shot, you might learn a thing or two from
the thread where I helped Abron.
Since the thread I took and moved my tree from the management side to the profile side and gave it it's own page so even if the pet's not yours and even if you're logged out, you'll still be able to track a pet's lineage. I wanted to be able to both link family trees together
and still link to a pet's profile. To achieve both, I made it so that when a pet is hovered over, it's name and basic information are replaced with links - one to go to a profile, and one to go their family tree.
I'm very happy with the end result! I hope this feature will give my site the edge it needs to compete with other sites.
(As a reminder, gender on my site is irrelevant to pet breeding and this is intentional because it's not "sexual" in the first place and gender and sex aren't really the same thing, anyway?)
These are the next three features on my mind:
Like System - Pressing a heart on a pet's profile will increase the number beside it, visually showing how many people have enjoyed this pet. The pet's id will be added to an array containing a list of all the pets you've ever liked. You'll be able to view a directory of all the pets you've ever liked in case you want to give them love later! (This does not correlate with Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr likes - just the same concept. Of course I'll want to help people share their pets on social media, later, but this is not related to social networking.)
Random Name Generator - Isn't it tough to think of pet names? Even though pet names can be shared and you'll never be barred from using a name that's already been used by someone else, sometimes you just aren't feeling creative. Names will be generated by slapping syllables together from arrays, and each species will have it's own set of arrays, producing pets that culturally authentic sounding names that varies by species.
Flip Pet Direction - This'll only be done with CSS on the front end of the site. Basically, if a user wants a particular pet image the other way, they can - and it'll be wrapped in a CSS class that'll flip the images inside.
and also
Quality of Life Implementations - Live registration regex checking, check if username is taken, username suggestions from friend list (while sending a new PM, a donation, or opening a trade), also check if user exists (before sending a new PM, a donation, or opening a trade).