Side Jobs

What have I been up to?

Obviously, I have not been posting here, but I have been busy beyond work.

I have been doing some experimentation with Drupal and what it can do. Specifically, a coworker hosts a site for the part of the The Matrix Online community that he operates in.

They had a decent site. There was a little content, mostly hand coded, that he was in the process of tooling. There was also a fairly active forum based on phpBB. It was a good setup for what he was doing, but may not have exactly been what he wanted to deliver.

I had been showing off some of what I had done here with Drupal, and talked about how much easier I was finding it to do different things on the site. I showed him how the forums and images and some other content all integrated together. I showed how access to the forums and other content were managed through the same access controls.

I had talked about a couple of modules that I was not using, but that could have helped him achieve the user experience he was looking to delivery, something that included a mix of MxO game mechanics and web-mediated role playing and story telling.

Twelve weeks ago, I was surprised to see that he had pulled the trigger and added a Drupal install to his site. He had even gone as far as to redo his forums in Drupal. It's a much different site from what I have here. The coworker is a fairly capable graphic designer and one of the top people I know in digial imaging (ButterPhat is still #1). And he had an already established community from his faction in MxO.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been playing with a few of the Drupal modules that I thought I would not have a use for here at SysMango, in an attempt to see if I could help him get a little closer to his vision for that site.

I actually found it kind of liberating.

First off, I built a development environment, downloaded bunches of modules and just turned them all on. A couple of days later, I had a mess. But it was fun.

After I got that out of my system, I redid the database for the site. All the modules were still there, but I only turned on what I thought I needed to achieve the effect I was looking for. And that did involve downloading a couple more modules that I did not get before.

The first thing that I went after was adding a realtime chat function to the site. MxO seems driven as much by the text-based chat as it is the gameplay. A MxO website might get the same kind of value from that.

The only MMORPG I have played is UntilUru. But I have listened to this group at work talk about MxO since it was launched. The player portion of the game is driven by factions and ship groups. Drupal has a set of modules for what they call Organic Groups, groups that are not part of the security roles, but still allow a user population to organize itself, as it sees fit.

Using the OG modules with Drupal's phpfreechat integration, I was able to put together an emulation of MxO's textchat that seemed to work. One big channel for everyone. One channel for each faction. One channel for a ship crew. And an optional channel for 'teams.'

The only question I have now is, will it scale?

In addition to chat, I also looked at augmenting his use of flatforums.module. Flatforums pushes Drupal's native forum look-and-feel to be closer to specialized forum software, like phpBB. It is not exactly the same, I believe that if you are looking for more than just a forum, it may be a good way to go. It may not provide everything that a phpBB or Invision Power Board does, but those forums do not give you everything that a more robust cms does. There seems some debate about the validity of flatforums in Drupal, but I like it.

One of the things lacking from flatforum.module is user badges, those little icons that usually show in the author information block that show degree of membership or role in the forum. You might have one image for new people, another for people who have posted for a while, and another for someone that has posted every hour of every day. Or it could be an image for each user group on the forum to denote either a administrator/moderator role or that they are on this or that team.

The userbadges.module provides at least part of that solution, the graphics and a way to assign them to users. All it took as a minor addition to the theme files to include it in the layout.

I am still looking for ways to assign users to a group via an automated action, driven by the number of posts they have logged (I've seen this called rank, karma and some other things). More research is required.

If I can figure out the right way to implement flatforums on the current theme here, I may add that to SysMango as well.

The last little gem I put up was banner.module. This module has the ability to do content blocks, but I found that it worked more like I was expecting with a some more theme modifications. Of course, I was testing using forum signature images. Images sized for sidebars may work better in the blocks.

I like banner.module. The option to track and report the banner views and clicks just seems interesting. Right now I'm trying to think about how to use banner.module as the basis for an image rotator for remote sites. For this I am thinking of forum signatures (do different sigs get more attention?)

So far, not much of what I have played with has found its way onto that community's site. That will take some time. Some of the changes involving OG and groups, while logical given the setup, may cause other issues. I have also noticed problems with the phpfreechat integration that I'm not sure about. And do I want to be the cause of what will surely be a lot of cyber-slacking by this group?

But for me, it's just another research project.