StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So here's my dilemma.


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My site, NintendoPlayers, is badly in need of a new coder and I'd like to really overhaul it with a focus on community stuff. This is the site's largest failing- while the actual news portion of the site has great design and the backbone is there for community stuff (user profiles and accounts that integrate through the site to let you leave comments on the articles and tracks posts you've made), it's completely separate from the forum (requiring the user have two accounts) and none of the planned features ever got implemented before the coder moved on to graduation and marriage.

We've got a lot of stuff like a huge games database that we could integrate but never got the chance.
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Without this, the community is slowly dying off, and we would like to find a coder willing to help build up the community side of things from beyond a simple PHP forum to something really big, with user blogs and facebook-style profiles and all of that. Thing is that we're all poor college students. We want to go about finding a coder, preferably one who likes Nintendo, who would be interested in joining in on such a project.

The site's written in PHP, but I wouldn't care if it was rewritten. However, losing the games database (everything is SQL) would be a huge blow, so keeping with SQL is important or transferring everything from the SQL DB to a new one would be fine too.

The idea would be that if the site ever becomes profitable, said coder would get a very sizable cut of the profits, which could end up quite a lot. If the site flops, then none of us really make anything. We might be able to pay maybe a hundred or two hundred dollars for their time up front but can't really promise more

Problem I'm having is that I don't even have the slightest clue where to start looking for someone interested in such a project.

I know there's some coders here, and you coders must know other coders. Does anyone have any tips on where I could ask around?

Thanks for any helpful advice, whether positive or critical.

You have too many forums.

Is the front end a custom CMS or some stock one like Drupal or whatnot?

Xeriar wrote:You have too many forums.

Is the front end a custom CMS or some stock one like Drupal or whatnot?

Completely custom-written in PHP.

The only thing that is stock is the PHPBB forums found at http://www.nintendoplayers.com/forum/

We made mockups of a custom-built forum but never got anything coded.

http://www.nintendoplayers.com/forums/

And yeah, I would love to either completely eliminate the PHPBB board and replace it with a custom one or integrate it so it uses the user tables from the main site and people don't need multiple accounts, and add stuff like user blogs, and have everything linking to the same profiles.

Talk to the head of your school's CS department. This sounds like an interesting project for a software engineering course.

Praxis wrote:I know there's some coders here, and you coders must know other coders.

I know a games nut who's spent the last several years doing web apps in PHP, who might be interested in a project like that. I'll mention it next time we go out for a drink together. I'd be interested myself if I was 19, unfortunately I'm 28 and completely full with work these days.

Does anyone have any tips on where I could ask around?

Relevant IRC channels eg some of the ones on Freenode IRC. The 'off topic' part of the forums for gamer-oriented webcomics e.g. Penny Arcade, VG cats etc.

Praxis wrote:

Xeriar wrote:You have too many forums.

Is the front end a custom CMS or some stock one like Drupal or whatnot?

Completely custom-written in PHP.

The only thing that is stock is the PHPBB forums found at http://www.nintendoplayers.com/forum/

We made mockups of a custom-built forum but never got anything coded.

http://www.nintendoplayers.com/forums/

And yeah, I would love to either completely eliminate the PHPBB board and replace it with a custom one or integrate it so it uses the user tables from the main site and people don't need multiple accounts, and add stuff like user blogs, and have everything linking to the same profiles.

You may want to check out Drupal. You're asking for a level of dedication and skill that you're not going to find for free outside of a major open source project like that. Just create a custom module that links up your games database, and port the theme over. Drupal will handle everything else you want - blogs, profiles, etc.

Idjit in my sig runs Drupal, as does The Onion and a lot of other major sites. It's very flexible, and very powerful.

Since I'm looking to get some experience under my belt with drupal modules, I might be willing to help out.

I know a games nut who's spent the last several years doing web apps in PHP, who might be interested in a project like that. I'll mention it next time we go out for a drink together.

Hm, let me know what he says please!

You may want to check out Drupal. You're asking for a level of dedication and skill that you're not going to find for free outside of a major open source project like that. Just create a custom module that links up your games database, and port the theme over. Drupal will handle everything else you want - blogs, profiles, etc.

I wouldn't mind switching to a CMS, but my question is how exandable it would be on the forum side of things. I'm shooting for something notably more complex than a standard forum- I want people to be able to select which games they own and have a visual library showing box arts (we have the games database in place for stuff like this), see what games other people have in their profiles, see who else owns the same games, etc, and be able to have their own blogs (not just staff members, but every user account) and post shoutouts to other user's profiles.

If that can be done, then I see no downsides to using something like Drupal. Though I wonder whether it would be harder to expand the stuff we already have or to convert it all over to Drupal and add all of that. But I'd probably leave those options up to the coder.

Relevant IRC channels eg some of the ones on Freenode IRC. The 'off topic' part of the forums for gamer-oriented webcomics e.g. Penny Arcade, VG cats etc.

I'll give these a shot!

Praxis wrote:I wouldn't mind switching to a CMS, but my question is how exandable it would be on the forum side of things. I'm shooting for something notably more complex than a standard forum- I want people to be able to select which games they own and have a visual library showing box arts (we have the games database in place for stuff like this), see what games other people have in their profiles, see who else owns the same games, etc, and be able to have their own blogs (not just staff members, but every user account) and post shoutouts to other user's profiles.

As a -forum-, Drupal is currently pretty weak (though the advanced forum module goes a ways), but you have pretty weak needs for a forum. As a glue CMS, Drupal has integrated blogs and hundreds of custom modules, up to and including building Facebook clones.

In my opinion a bit much is hardcoded, but it's more flexible than anything else you'll find out there and certainly a stretch better than reinventing the wheel a million times.

If that can be done, then I see no downsides to using something like Drupal. Though I wonder whether it would be harder to expand the stuff we already have or to convert it all over to Drupal and add all of that. But I'd probably leave those options up to the coder.

You are wanting to add the kitchen sink to your website. Doing it all on your own creates some concerns. The only eyes on your code are your own - who handles security? What if your framework turns out to be less than perfectly robust?

On top of having integrated blogs, forums, feeds, and other features, Drupal solves that stuff outright. It's not trivial - php is sometimes lambasted for creating a culture where writing crap code is encouraged, so that can seep in.