Hi guys
I just joined the group, it doesn't seem to be particularly active but I'll talk into the void anyway and see if anyone replies.
Background:
I have a site http://www.fightingmongooses.co.uk that is currently in version 2, using a CMS built to work on top of our phpBB forum. It's been in this stage for over 2 years now, and could really do with some major improvements. That said, we get a lot of compliments due to it being "not just another guild site", and I've had offers of work from other GLs to build them something similarly unique which I keep having to turn down due to the totally customized code and the time it would take to redo for someone else's needs.
I had the bright idea that if I built the next version on a CMS, I'd have a starting point for a reusable package and be able to consider some of these job offers.
To that end, I'm currently wrapping up development of Fighting Mongooses v3.0. I'm not exactly an experienced Drupal user, so some of the problems I've encountered were due to that rather than any sort of limitation with the platform. All in all it's looking pretty spiffy, and I will of course update this post once it goes live (so many custom breadcrumbs to create, so little time!).
The actual discussion:
Looking around the group posts there are obviously a few guild sites built on Drupal. I was hoping for a bit of discussion on where the major gaps lie, nonexistant modules or functionality that a lot of guilds need. Personally everything my guild needs has been easily achieved (relatively speaking, anyway) but we're not exactly...usual....I know for example that DKP is possibly an issue for the more hardcore types?
My aim is basically to have a list of things that have never been adequately "solved", my sidekick is a pro module developer so for example modules to integrate data from addons such as Headcount with, say, userpoints module are not beyond the realms of possibility.
Anyway yes, that's about it, hello from me and feel free to share your frustrations that we might actually be able to do something about them :)
Shell
Comments
Drupal and WoW
Hey kiramanic,
We have our own Drupal guild site live at www.twcgaming.org. It's been live for about 3-4 months now. Forum pages are a bit slow, but that has to do with the fact that our DB server isn't really optimized properly. We're in the process of looking for a new host. Otherwise site's working the way we want.
Since you mentioned DKP, I'll touch upon how we handled it. We have our own DKP system and we don't use any of those DKP managers (WebDKP, PhPRaider, etc). We have our own in-game addon to handle the system during raids, and it outputs data as a .lua file. Our site contains a lua2phparray.php converter, along with several other scripts that wrote the php array into the database and then pull it out to display them in a dynamic table. Pretty simple setup. Works well for us, and would work well for anyone who uses a DKP addon that outputs a .lua file.
Our guild is relatively hardcore at PvE content. We're pretty progressed into ICC25. Drupal fulfills all our needs as a gaming community and then some. So I can't really complain. Our site is relatively new and I'm still adding things to it all the time. Currently working on Content Profile and CCK integration for instance. Also going to be changing our Guild Applications into a content type of its own. So there's still work to do, but we really haven't found something Drupal can't accomplish. Very powerful CMS.
So where are the issues?
You mention "major issues for Drupal guild sites" in your title, yet you mentioned zero (except the DKP issue which adener addressed). I think Adener's guild site is gorgeous, personally, & really showcases what can be done w/Drupal for gaming guilds.
I suggested using Drupal for my old WoW guild (temporary insanity, kilrogg US) several times but the original webdev, though he was inactive, did not want to give up control. Non-issue for me, I just knew Drupal could do soooo much more than a clusterfudge of mismash php & forums. I've since built a couple sites on Drupal for my new MMO, Warhammer Online (sorry, but original WoW rocked, everything since BC has slowly eroded that initial fun) but I won't list them here since this is WoW territory (I also built a site for my EQ guild, Circle of Valor, which is now defunct). Neither has needed to use DKP since WHO is about PvP not PvE. I've never found Drupal to be lacking in any area for anything I've ever needed. So your title, kiramanic, comes off as a bit of FUD.
Great site, Adener! I really love it!!! As someone who's been into MMORPGs since EQ1 beta (Xegony server), I really like the features you've provided your guildies. Great guilds, especially when they're growing or already huge, require a great infrastructure. Leadership that doesn't get burned out, an active, contributing player base, a way to virtually communicate &, last but not least, a website that serves the purpose of the guild and provides members with valuable tools for engagement & information-sharing are all big keys to success. Props to you & yours.
Cya'll in Star Wars: The Old Republic (www.swtor.com - a Drupal site!) or Diablo 3. ;)
Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu
Ok so I fail at naming
Ok so I fail at naming threads, shoot me. The whole point is that I'm trying to find out what issues actually exist, perhaps this was a bad idea after all.
Our old site was in
Our old site was in GuildPortal. As you said, large guilds gaming at a certain level require some customized infrastructure and unhinged access to their communication portals. GP wasn't giving us that, not to mention they started having ridiculous downtime right around when we left them.
TWC isn't really just a WoW Guild. We've been alive with the same core group of people for a full decade now, 6 years in EQ and then 4 years in WoW. Some of our players (including myself) are starting to branch into Vanguard a little bit. Others played or still play WAR. We're all looking forward to both Guild Wars 2 and SW:TOR. On the side, we continue to use our forums in facilitating Steam games within our community (L4D2, Borderlands, TF2, etc). Hell, some of us even do old fashioned tabletop DnD over the internet through a neat little map tool.
Point is that our organization isn't really tied to a game, and it's important for the infrastructure to be flexible enough to accommodate that. Drupal offers that and more. It's extremely modular and theming is very easy. If we all stopped playing WoW and some other game became our primary focus, the site and all of its tools could be changed to reflect that in less than a day's work.
I will raise a major issue with Drupal though. In order for it to support large communities and database intensive architectures (like our extremely active forums, and CCK-rich node types such as Raid Events and Applications), the database server needs to be optimized very well. Not every hosting service does that, and amongst the ones that do, not every one offers access to specific DB server settings to their users. So at some point, no matter how well you make your front end performance (and trust me, ours cant get any better), you're at the mercy of your host on the back end. Not every guild has the financial power to opt for dedicated hosting, and you can only do so much with shared. So while Drupal is very modular and scales very well, it also needs to be suitable for shared hosting even on larger websites. I don't profess to know much about Drupal's internal structure, so I can't say how to accomplish that or if it's even possible to accomplish, but this is really Drupal's only weak spot.
Calendar
I had also made our site in Drupal with a (linked) PHPBB2 forum. What I missed most in terms of a standard ready to go module was a calendar with signup features for raidplanning. You can work something out with other modules, but it's hard to get it to work like a guild usually likes. You should be able to plan events, set how many people are needed (max), say which roles, accept people, tentative subscriptions, declines, etc. I use Guildlaunch now, which has a very nice raidplanner, but I would love to go back to Drupal.
Great Discussion
Good discussion regarding Drupal and guild hosting.
I to have run into the same issues as Techivist, trying to encourage our guild to a Drupal site. Currently we are hosted on Guildomatic. A few of the tools built into the site have been invaluable to the guild, most noteably headcount for tracking attendance.
I am a drupal developer and have done quite a bit of custom code for drupal and wow guild hosting, but I haven't gotten around to integrating headcount. (As a side note, I did create a script to import Guild Calendar 5 .lua and post it to a calendar as well as importing epgp.lua to determine if a user received EP for a raid during that time. It's incomplete, but it's an idea.)
Probably what I find the most the weakest part of Drupal is the built in forum. It's clunky, hard to administer and doesn't seem as intuitive as others (phpBB). Using Advanced Forums (I think it's called) makes a huge difference, but it has not been updated for Drupal 7, which I am now developing for.
With Drupal 7's updated database handling and CCK Fields in code, I'm hoping that database performance increases (as advertised). Otherwise, I stick to aggressive caching of pages.
I would be interested in what other issues people run into while a guild site (Drupal or not) and what features people find necessary in a site.
Alex
Drupal and Gaming Utilities
My coding skills don't go beyond a rudimentary understanding of PHP and some MySQL, but it seems to me that a lot of the addon to website integrations are dependent on the limitations of the addons themselves. WoW inherently prevents any addon from communicating with a program or a website outside the game. So while it would be fantastic to have these real-time updated DKP systems, it's just not possible. All of them require the user to manually upload an output file into a web system designed to read, interpret and display the data.
Our own DKP system works that way as well. We have a custom coded addon that outputs an array of players and corresponding points (among other details). A lua2phparray.php script converts the lua array into php upon file upload. Subsequently another script writes the array into a database table for a custom Drupal page to pull the data and display it in a table. It's very straightforward, and the challenge isn't on the Drupal end.
I don't see any reason why Headcount couldn't be integrated in a similar fashion. This depends a lot on modifying the addon so that its output is readable by Drupal but let's take a look at what Drupal has available.
WoWCharSheet and WoWGuild bring the functionality to associate WoWToons as "nodes" with a user. These WoWToon nodes have the character name as the title.
If Headcount is modified to output its data in a lua array, this can then be converted into phparray the same way our DKP system does. Subsequently, another script can cross-check character names amongst the WoWToons that Drupal users claimed for their account on the website. When the script sees a match, that character's Headcount information goes into a particular Headcount table, and the entry is then associated with the matching user ID in the Drupal installation.
If you're using Character Profile module, you can have CCK Computed Fields in your user profile pages that pull out necessary Headcount data from the DB table onto the user page through a PHP script running a MySQL query. AuthorPane addon can probably be modified the same way to reflect any relevant data onto the user author panels in Drupal forums. That's a lot of queries of course if you a lot of site users, but caching can alleviate that. CCK isn't very efficient right now, we found, but with the fields becoming a core part of D7, and the advertised DB improvements on top, this wouldn't necessarily be a bad way to go for future sites.
The capability to do that exists, as far as I know - which isn't much to be honest, compared to many of the Drupal contributors here. The catch here is that Headcount needs to be able to export its data in .lua format and the user then manually has to upload this .lua file onto the Drupal site for parsing. This manual upload method is something that you simply have to do with any WoW addon exporting information outside though.
World of Logs service gets around this by running an external program behind WoW that continuously checks the CombatLog file as the game writes data into it. If real-time updates are crucial, perhaps a similar approach is possible with DKP addons or Headcount, where the background program continuously watches a static file on the HDD that the addon writes onto, and uploads the information real time. I'm not entirely convinced that this is necessary for gaming though. Manual file uploads before and after each raid has served my guild well so far. Our addon is capable of putting data into raid chat, and answer people with automatic whispers containing their DKP data, for when we really need to share the DKP information in the middle of a raid. Anything more is just overkill? ;)
The way we do it on my
The way we do it on my current site is to use Headcount's XML export, which can then be converted to PHP in a similar way to how yours probably works. That said it's not all been easy, Headcount has had some major issues and despite the fact that rather large sites (like Wowstead) for example, use it there have been times when it just doesn't get updated. If it were more stable it would be a good solution for those of us whose guildies don't include an lua genius.
I'd love to have a custom addon, maybe one day :D
Wrath
I run an SW:TOR guild called Wrath on drupal with drupal forums.
http://www.wrath-tor.com/
(always a work in progress)
Our only major issues so far are the following:
1.) Forum moderation
2.) DKP. (we call it WPP) We're using userpoints right now, but we had to hack together some things to get it to work using the services API.
3.) Raid Events / Event Attendance. I've looked at several options, but I still haven't found one that I feel works well for a guild.
SWTOR guild site
http://aftermathguild.org/
I am also running a SWTOR guild site in drupal 7 and have had a pretty hard time finding a module that would work for raid/event signup and attendance. I am about to scrap the site and go over to Joomla. I have been using userpoints as well and the advanced forum module for forum moderation. The site is still definitely a work in progress but I still have 50 days to get something for raids up and running. Until then I am forced to use a generic guild hosting site for my 100+ member guild.
I created a module here to
I created a module here to help building Website community site for WoW:
http://drupal.org/sandbox/SylvainLecoy/1256604
The module is production ready and here is a demo: http://shinsen.fr/
I am also writing a module for EPGP/DKP that I will also release, it need the former module to work.
SWTOR Guild site
I also am running a TOR Guild site, tho itself is in visual construction, I've worked on the code extremely and thus have created this :
http://www.419guild.com/
If you wish for an email of the massive amounts of modules used, please so let me know with email at sam@bahrij.com
Issues found:
- Limited use of raid or Calendar planner's
- Mass issue with uses unable to edit forum posts or delete there own
DAoC, warhammeronline and WOH
I was extremely lucky to be hired by Bioware/Mythic (EA) to replace darkageofcamelot.com with a Drupal 6 site that could be easily updated by the game producers and moderators. After that site went live, a decision was made to convert it to Drupal 7, which I didn't know at the time. (learn, learn, learn)
After the new D7 DAoC site was launched, I started working on a D7 overhaul of warhammeronline.com, which was immediately put on hold so I could write a brand new D7 site for their new play-for-free game, Wrath of Heroes. That site launched in September 2011 (wrathofheroes.com) and I finally got to get back to the WAR site, which was completed at the end of Nov 2011.
Alas, I was hired as a temporary contractor, so that is where my story ends. As of today (March 1, 2012) the new warhammeronline.com site is still in QA, so I'm hoping it will go live soon.
You guys who maintain your own guild sites are awesome!
update March 9, 2012 - The new Drupal 7 warhammeronline.com site is live! I'm seeing a few problems that the "new guy" missed (a new block that appearing on some pages it shouldn't, etc.) but at least it's there.