There is a project currently underway to unite the various geographic-based groups in the Southwest that play Magic into one uber-group. This is no small task and at the moment is being rolled out through Devon then is planned to incorporate the rest of the Westcountry.

My part in this is building and managing the website for the group. And this is an update for the people who have an interest.

There’s a common phrase in software development: “It’s always good to throw one away.” If that’s so, then I’ve been very good indeed. It’s now just less than a week into the development of the website and I’ve tried and discarded various bits and bobs. If Magic was software and creatures were PHP and mana was HTML then I’d have tested an entire format.

For various reasons, I’m disinclined to build an entire site for MTG Southwest from the ground up. It’s too time intensive, it’s not worth the money, testing for such a project is more than even I have the stomach for, let alone my volunteer testing team. Not to mention the design work involved with making it look pretty and usable. Instead I’m using a freely-available content management system (CMS) called WordPress. Well, strictly speaking WordPress is a blogging system but it has features that lends it to working as a CMS. In fact, being a blogging system makes WordPress even more suited to the needs of the community than a more business oriented CMS. WordPress is made by people who know what they’re doing and as a widely used system it’s been tested in various stages for years by thousands of people including commercial developers, business end-users and people who keep a blog about their knitting.

I like WordPress. It has some sweet extensions, or plugins, that offer all kinds of functionality to a site as well as themes to make it look pretty. And that’s what I’ve been buggering about with for the last week.

There’s a plugin called BuddyPress. What this does is, after a bit of configuring, it turns a website in a social network site. It supports groups and profiles and all that gubbins and with some further extensions designed to work with BuddyPress it offers forums and event management. There’s one problem with this – BuddyPress only plays nicely with themes designed specifically to work with it. If you don’t use one of these themes then all kinds of funny things happen – menus don’t display, pages fail to render, the functionality that BuddyPress offers doesn’t exist, that kind of thing. This is all well and good. But.

But this site has a few specific requirements that couldn’t be met by themes written for BuddyPress. For example, we decided we needed a “feature box” to appear at the top of the home page, just beneath the banner and above the first article teaser, that provides links to calendars of events run by each of the various groups. Whilst this is possible to achieve in BuddyPress, it’s only achievable through the themes and I discovered that the themes are, well, rather incestuous. And when you think you need to be working in one theme – the theme you’re using on your site – you actually need to be making changes in another theme. And after digging through code to try and find the right script to edit, that script points at a different script and… well…

So I ran out of patience. I ditched it.

I went back to the drawing board – which looks rather a lot like a popular search engine – and I looked for an alternative to BuddyPress. Something that provides user-to-user messaging, forums, customisable user profiles.

And I found a system called Mingle. Mingle isn’t precious about the themes it shares sites with. Mingle is easy to configure. Once you’ve customised one WordPress theme you know exactly what needs to be done to customise a theme for your Mingle-based site.

So that’s what we have. We’ve got got one collection of websites, screwed up into balls and thrown into the corner. And we’ve got one social network site that is powered by a Mingle-enabled WordPress blogging system. It’s got custom features built by my own fair hands, it’s got an event calendar that can be used by the different groups that run events, it’s got forums, it’s got user profiles and the best thing is it’s taken a lot less time to get to this point than if I’d done the whole thing myself from the ground up.

What it doesn’t have is the right look. And a few of the features are in the wrong places. But that’s fine, that’s fixable. Those things are simple jobs to be done next.

And I’m really excited at the prospect of doing them.