So I ditched BuddyPress and started investigating Mingle as the software to power the new MTG Southwest website. Mingle seemed perfect – the theming was intuitive, the navigation of the site was fine and so on. Then I came to test the social aspect of the social network site – you know what I mean, sending messages, adding friends, looking at profiles, that kind of thing.

To do this I created a second user account, fired up a second browser, logged in with both accounts at the same time and sent a message from my original, admin account to the new one. Turns out you can only send messages to people on your friends list. Bit inconvenient, and something I’d like to configure before the site goes live. So I navigated to the other account’s profile and added them as a friend. Except, I couldn’t find a way to do that.

So here I was, with a social networking site, with two accounts both logged in and both completely unable to interact with the other. Fucking brilliant.

And back to BuddyPress I went. For all the failings of the theming engine, at least users of a social networking site could actually use the social networking site for social networking.

So that’s where we are. Actually, we’re quite a lot further than that. There’s forums and groups. The groups allow some forums to be kept private if that’s ever needed. Users can search these to find relevant information and if they can’t find it they can create a group to discuss their interests. There are user profile pages it’s possible to post comments to, rather like the wall of another site you might have heard of. There’s private messaging for, well, messaging in private. And there’s even an events section – a calendar of events, colour-coded by town or city, visible a month at a time with links to information about each event.

There’s a chap called Tom Palmer. Now, Tom is brilliant. He’s only gone an designed a logo and a masthead for the site. I’m really pleased with his work and how the site looks as well as how it functions.

At the moment I’ve thrown it to the lions’ den and a group of about 10 people are using it, trying to break it, making sure that everything works as they expect it to and that the tasks they needs to perform are performed how they expect. This has thrown up a couple of things. First, email notifications were happening for every single action that takes place on the site that affects your account – for Tom this was generating about 200,431 emails a day. Fortunately there are options in user account settings for such things. Phew! Also, another user identified that the way I’d structured the forum did necessarily make sense in all circumstances – although I’ll defend my decision, I can see how having two separate groups for Modern and Legacy format discussion might be an obstacle if you want to discuss prize support for Modern and Legacy events you plan to run.

But that’s all part of the process and all those detail will get sorted out.

So thank you to Tom and thank you also to the testing people.