What would you do, if you got to start all over again for your guild site?

This is potentially the situation I am in, as I just transfered servers and in a fledgling guild.

Previously, I was running a site for a guild using phpNuke (obviously with the integrated phpbb), WoWRoster (integrated into nuke, kinda), nuked-eqdkp, nuked-phpRaid (from spiffyJr), and had little bits and tweaks in there.

This worked alright, though it was quite a task getting all the logins and stuff combined to be less hassle for my users, etc. Once it was set up though, it worked, and it got outdated, because it was easy in the "if it ain't broke..." kind of way.

If you were going to start over and make the Fully Functional guild website, what things would you use?

For what its worth, I have had such great success over the years with WoWRoster, that I would like to stick to as much material here as I can... It appears that the devs are working on a DKP system, which I am more than excited about...

As far as raid scheduling, having one integrated login for all systems, and just maintaining guild stuffs and forum stuffs in general, what would you use? This includes CMS. There is stuff out there for nuke, dragonfly, joomla, and who knows what else. I'm not partial to any in particular. =)

I am sure there are going to be about a thousand and one answers. Thats okay. Just let me know why you would choose it. =) Thanks all.

-Scapegoat

I am actually in the same situation as you, and have been for a while. What I decided to do was run project adminpanel which is the codename for the next major roster release.

adminpanel has securety integrated in with it, the only thing you would be missing is DKP and Forums integration

I WAS working on a forums addon for adminpanel, and the DKP addon is also in development.

my conclusion is this: If you want a "pure" roster website wait until adminpanel, DKP, and Forums are ready for production, otherwise run 3 standalone systems non integrated (roster, DKP, forums).

Actually, we have stopped development on "AdminPanel" which was the next major release of Roster, at it's core is still the old Roster code

We are starting on "CPFramework" which will be built from the ground up

You might see things from "AdminPanel" in future versions of the 1.x line

Well.. thanks.. hehe

I think that obviously, having all elements of a site come from the same development team would be ideal, as it would most likely make all the integration seamless. So far, I have the utmost faith in the Roster team that this will happen eventually. That said; I know from experience that its a pain in the ass to develop multiple systems at the same time with a small team, not to mention that there are tiny tweaks that need to be made every time Blizzard decides to change stuff.

So. For the sake of discussion...

Lets assume I have to build a site in the next few weeks. Unfortunately, I can't use a complete suite from here.

Until the time that that's possible... what would people use? =)

CMS- phpNuke
scheduling- phpRaid
dkp- eqdkp
forums- phpNuke (phpbb)
roster- Roster

What are recommendations for a fully integrated site including the features of these systems?

Or, as mentioned by Matt, would you all recommend Not trying to integrate all these systems and jsut have them run independantly? To me, this seems like the best way to ensure each system works the way intended.

I think my personal bottom line is this: As an admin, I don't mind taking extra time and effort into setting a site up; BUT, I want the end-user (normal guildie or applicant) to have the smoothest, least complicated, most pain-free experience possible. If users think some part of the site is a pain in the ass.. they won't use it.

So that's where I stand. =)

May be this is a good point to start a topic on the ideals of a perfect guild site... Personaly i use CMS- phpNuke (dragonfly) and have had fun with it as a guild site, but having to get members to register twice - once for dragobfly then again for phpraid has been a pain, as some members, no matter how easy you make things stil manage to make a meal of it. And for some reason no matter how good you get the site working it just constantly seems to be missing some thing yet the more you add to it the more complicated the site looks.

By far the easiest and most effective guild site i have run for my members over the last 2 years would have to be Matt Millers "Guils Site" It was extremely easy to add a new feature to the site and link it to the main page, the events system was perfection in the way you could control who signs up, alt management etc. And the site registration tied directly into the forums and member names loaded into the site by uploading your cp.lua was nice and easy and was a good way to protect your forum registration from non members. But as the prject was dropped then yea i would have to go with CMS- phpNuke, Its just a shame its so hard to port applications to it.

I deally all you realy need on a guildsite is your -
Roster
DKP
Events
Forums
Gallery
Overall registration
Main page for guild news and your links

Well now we are on this topic of what cms and apps to use, I have installed and tried many diffrent cms apps out there and come to love dragonflycms therefore I have done the porting of roster over to this cms. I have found the code is alot like php-nuke with a bit more security with that said as soon as I get roster 1.7.2 ported to DF I will try to port roster to nuke as well. My guilds site currentlly uses eqdkp which I have somewhat intergrated via an addon for roster and for the events to mke it seemless we use a wow addon called group calendar which allows us to create and sign up for events in game then we upload the .lua file to rosters Event addon.
My current site is http://infragilisguild.com/index.php?name=wowrosterdf I have added df auth to roster so there are a few things that you will not be able to view unless you are logged in.

well... I think what I will do then, as our guild is still very small...

Install Dragonfly as our site root.

Add the Dragonfly Roster port when it is released.

Add the DKP wizard when it comes out.

and by that time, maybe our scheduling will suck enough that we need to add phpraider or whatever is out at that time.

how does that sound to everyone? am I in for something smooth?