Guild Forum / Portal Software

I’ve been asked / volunteered to help set up and run a website for the Super Group I’ve joined in City of Heroes. (Chutta is currently running the group, if anyone cares.)

Anyway – I’m willing, and its not like I don’t have any experience with community sites. But it has been a while. Does anyone have any suggesstions for software? I’m imagining something similar to PHP-Nuke, but PHP-Nuke type sites tend to feel kludgy to me, as a user. (The notable exception was PlanetJumpgate.) I’ve got a valid vBulletin licence at my disposal, but somehow that seems over-kill for what we’re planning.

Basically what I’m going for is a basic guild news and information site with messageboards and possibly a group calander for scheduling events.

Any thoughts/sugestions for good (hopefully free) CMS software packages to look at?

-Hool

Also – if anyone is playing CoH and is looking to join a Super Group, let me know.

Edited on May 27th 2004, 05:58 by Hooloovoo

Edited on May 27th 2004, 18:34 by Hooloovoo

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Robert

Robert Belknap has been writing online sporadically since 2001. See the colophon for more details.

10 thoughts on “Guild Forum / Portal Software”

  1. [Quote] The notable exception was PlanetJumpgate. [Quote]

    Because it wasn’t a Nuke site.

    Thought about hosting? I’ve seen Guild Portal (subscription based) and Guild Universe (free), although I have no idea whether these are usable or not.

  2. I know it wasn’t a nuke site. It was so much better, yet had many of the same kinds of features I see on nuke sites. Your implementation kicked so much more ass than any nuke site Ive seen. 🙂

    We’ve got a member with a domain name, (that happens to match the supergroup name – funny, that) so we were looking at running our own. However, hosting might be an option — especially short term. I’ll look into those, thanks!

  3. I was going to write something witty regarding your calls for comments but decided to forego that. On a more serious note what is the supergroup’s name? When did you start playing and what are your impressions of the game? I wish I had the time for this (scratch that, I actually have some time this summer but it’s still the money issue(that and summer will eventually come to and end and school will start again, thus ending the free time)).

  4. Just use your vBulletin License (hopefully it’s 3.01) and use something simple like vbindex as a front page. That way you can use vBulletins calender functions and easily hack your own needs into the front page. Plus you’ll be using the vb db instead of trying to make a portal db integrate with a forums.

  5. Unvortunately my owned license expired last year (at version 2.3 something – IIRC). I can still use the software, I’m just not entitled to upgrades/support. (Unless I renew. $30 for a year. Might still do that.)

    Guess I should take a look at vbulletin.org, too and see if there are any hacks that will do exactly what I have in mind.

  6. I’m now a big fan of PHPBB, it’s fairly easy to customize, and there is a mod to add a forum-based calendar (kinda messy but neat if you get it working)

    Here’s the site,
    http://www.phpbb.com/

    The hardest part of getting it working is making sure you have a working MySQL database.

    Here’s the site where I’m using it:
    http://www.gotoracing.com/gtforums/

    Edited on May 27th 2004, 22:31 by bforsse

  7. I’mn actually looking at a couple of different phpbb based solutions. One of them is mx-portal – the other one I saw last night I seem to have managed not to blog. maybe I can find it in my history when I get home tonight (while my machine is downloading the gi-normous patch taht was released today.)

  8. [Quote] The hardest part of getting it working is making sure you have a working MySQL database [Quote]

    Well, that shouldn’t be too hard… 🙂

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