Over the last couple of weeks Andrew and I have put up the new blitzers and alliance website.
http://www.booscary.com/
The new site manages not only the Blitzers guild but also pages for our alliance members. Down the left hand side you can change the site to reflect the relevant guild information and style. For example:
http://www.booscary.com/scoutsoftyria
One lesson I learnt from the old site was not to tack on an alliance website by just copying the files and making a new site. This only increases the work you have to do when an update needs to be made.
This website is run via the same base files and mod rewrites to make the addresses pretty. Each guild has their own template which controls layout, style and images. While in theory all the sites could look completely different we have kept all of them with the same layout for now to keep a nice consitency.
The news and latest posts are filtered depending on which guild site the user is on. This is controlled by one guildsettings file.
Everything is based off the PHPBB3 forum. The news from a range of news forums. It pulls out the 1st post of the topic. This allows players to reply to the news items but still to have only officers post news items.
The page content and menu items are generated from an about forum for each of the guilds. This allows guild officers of each of the guilds to keep the site content up to date.
There are a few other neat things, but I can’t remember them now 🙂
In the end i’m kind of proud how neatly everything is done. It is really easy backend wise to add another guild to the site and manage them.
The other nice thing is that searching in google for blitzers guild returns the site as number 1. Its nice that all it takes is a well constructed and active website to get found.
I’m off to enjoy the end of the guild wars new year event.
