I’ve been remiss in updating the rollout of the new site design. It’s been a rather busy week here, fixing up some of the problems that I’ve run across and doing some other things.
The design is for my gaming community, cC (formerly’ cAn’s Crew). I’ll spare anyone *not* interested in the gory details by posting everything below the cut. Background
cC was founded in 2006. As is a requisite for most gaming communities, you need a game server and forums. That’s how the site started out – just a “stock” phpBB installation. About 2 1/2 years ago, one of the founders, cAnOPENER stepped aside, pushing the hosting off on the remaining members. cincinnati (cincy) was left in charge, and asked for someone to step up and help out with site maintenance. At the time, Preacher volunteered to host the site and take care of the ancillary pages (we also started hosting a MediaWiki installation for the more “static” stuff.)
Preacher rebuilt the site roughly a year ago to use his programming language of choice – Ruby on Rails. That takes a lot of extra configuration to get things like phpBB and Mediawiki running. Cincy handled the majority of the design look. The downside to preacher’s build is that he never really integrated the 3 sections of the site (home page, wiki, and forums). Each had their own distinct look and operation, logins weren’t integrated (as best as I can tell).
Fast forward to this past December/January, and cincy and preacher started discussions for him to not host the site anymore. There are rumors it was based on personal reasons, and I won’t go into those. Regardless, in January, we moved to a shared hosting provider with JustHost. I was asked if I could host from my VPS, but I declined, as I’m rather in the habit of wiping and reinstalling my VPS every few weeks (although I’m running on a good 7 weeks without a reformat right now). I also didn’t want to create an issue with the members if I decide to leave or whatnot.
With shared hosting, running a rails application takes a lot of work. I’m not very versed in Rails or configurations where I don’t have root access. Needless to say, I couldn’t get it running. On top of that, I honestly ask why it makes sense to run two different programming languages on a service that’s more built for PHP? But I digress.
The Integration
I make no bones about the fact that I’m a fan of WordPress. It’s a simple CMS system that can be expanded to infinite functionality. Theming WP is relatively straightforward. You can get as simple or complex as you like.
Since the forums constitute the majority of our history, it made sense to find a package to integrate with them. I found that in WP-United. Despite the developer’s occasional disappearances, the plugin works pretty well. Oh sure, there are other systems I could have looked into, even actually migrating us away from phpBB to another, like SMF, vBulletin, etc., but why switch?
The wiki solution was more a pain in the butt. Between the integration with WP and phpBB, MediaWiki would throw a PHP error every time I tried to integrate the WordPress theme. The inelegant solution would have been to basically skin MediaWiki with what I was doing for WP and be done with it. But it still makes it a standalone solution. Instead, I opted to install WikkaWiki and integrate that. (For the record, this involves invoking 3 calls in the wiki files – wp-load, get_header, and get_footer). Unfortunately, there’s no clear migration path between MediaWiki and WikkaWiki, so it means re-constituting the information manually. It’s probably for the best, as a lot of the information was out of date.
The Theme
I’m no stranger to theming from scratch. I dislike it, as there are about 50 different schools on the subject. Instead, I chose to go down the route of using an established framework. I used Justin Tadlock’s Hybrid framework for this. For a small fee, support is available on his forums, and he’s damn helpful. Unfortunately, I think his system’s a bit overloaded for what I need it for, and he tends to believe in using CSS for all styling (like doing rounded corners). But, it’s given me some great understanding of hooking into the WordPress system and using that instead of a myriad of downloadable plugins. While it’s common knowledge that too many plugins can slow down a WP site, I still wonder if hard-coding them helps that out or not. It certainly saves having to load more than the requisite stylesheets and javascript.
Combatting spam
One of the things I knew and suspected was that this move would open us up to the spam bots. In the first three days since putting the site live, Akismet stopped over 800 spam comments. On top of that, I still cleared out another 200 that made it through Akismet. On Monday, I put us on Cloudflare. In essence, it acts like a firewall, blocking known spam and bot traffic. It’s been a boon, as it’s blocked quite a bit of traffic. I’m debating putting t-gk.net on it, but I’m not sure how far I want to go with that yet. I don’t have the fine-tuned control that my friend SaYnt does with his registrar. I have some subdomains on here that I’m really not worried about getting hit. It’s the main site that really takes any traffic.
So there it is. A new site rolled out and functioning. Response to the redesign has been pretty positive so far amongst our members. How much longer this lasts is another question entirely. I really need to get back and get serious on the Piedmont Triad Productions site. I never really set a deadline or due date, but since I actually have to populate the content AND come up with the design, I’ve been dragging my feet. Time to get serious.