Of all the hobbies I undertake, leading Mystic Spiral [MYST] is the one I enjoy the most.  Founded in 2006 in Guild Wars we’ve had our ups and downs, seen some great and not so great people join and leave.  We’ve been the cause of several relationships, met each other in real life 4 times to date and now have a foothold in a small handful of games.  What started out as 2 people looking for a different way to run a guild has ended up as a fully fledged gaming community.  One thing that hasn’t changed in all that time is our space on the web – and it’s high time that it did.

In the last few months I’ve slowly been trying to make headway on learning php and mysql.  I’m already a professional programmer, but my home is with c-based languages rather than web based ones.  Sure I learnt HTML at 14 as my first foray into programming, but a hell of a lot has changed since then.  Now I feel like I’ve got enough of a skill set, I’ve made my test environment and started work on our new platform.

The aim is to create a space that meets the needs of a community that spans multiple games and keeps up with its members.  No small order then.  For all its flaws, forums still provide the best and most familiar area for discussion, so it will still be the cornerstone of the site.  Course, the choice of what to use isn’t straight forward – many seem to be loving Invision Power Board 3 whilst many are on phpBB3.  IPB would be great for us as we’re on IPB 2 right now, but the price tag has driven me to phpBB3, at least for development purposes.  Open source has its advantages.

Streamlining the system for organising events is high priority as this is a major hassle done on a forum.  From a personal viewpoint as guild leader, I want to not only remove the barriers to people talking to each other but also better communicate what is happening in the various games to my friends.  I also want to make the site as self sustaining as possible, so social networks get updated automatically (but responsibly), members wait on admins as little as possible and generally I and the officers spend less time organising and more time socialising.  There is a lot of custom code to make this happen.  Already I have to say thank you to one of my friends, Sevenforce, for his help and advice with mysql.  Having a professional web developer in the mix helps a lot!

Longer term, I’d like to be able to release this as a package for other similar communities.  I’m aiming to have the site out of alpha and up as a subdomain on this site for testing and working out the kinks within a few months, and up at least on our site before Guild Wars 2 is released.

There will be a few more posts outlining progress and features as we go along.  I’m aware this may bore some of my readers, but it helps me stay focussed to put the ideas out there and bounce them off people.  I’ll still be doing whatever it is I usually do (trolling? critiquing? raging? commenting?) on a similar basis.