StrategyCore.co.uk - A Labour of Love 8 Years in the Making

Not the snappiest title ever, but it got your attention

StrategyCore.co.uk is a site that’s evolved over the past 8 years from a basic HTML site hosted on Tripod (which wasn’t bad back when it only sported one banner ad) into a thriving(ish) community site covering a multitude of strategy titles for various gaming platforms that now gets a modest 150,000 hits a month and rising.

I’ve personally been using MODx for client sites for the past few years, mostly for smaller business sites but more recently for larger organisations that, for various reasons (none related to the quality of my work ) will remain anonymous.

As my knowledge of both PHP and Photoshop evolved, I’d been meaning to transform this several-hundred-page site one last time to achieve three goals:

• Shift the focus away from the 3 niche game series’ it focused on to allow us to cover ANY strategy game
• Give it a new look - one that I’ll finally be happy with so that I never have to redesign it again (this is something like version 5 by now )
• Most importantly - port it to a new CMS that allows any staff member to contribute and update content

This started off fairly ambitiously as with most of my ideas. We knew where we wanted to take the site and we had a lot of neat ideas, and I decided to go with MODx and spend the hundreds of hours I knew I’d have to put into the project to turn those ideas into a reality.

The result is the site you see now at StrategyCore.co.uk. It doesn’t bring anything radically new to the table, but I hope it at least does it well from a functional and presentational point of view.

Potential points of interest:

• Facebook-esque member bar "glued" to the bottom of the page (our core audience are web-savvy gamers so I wasn’t overly worried about usability with this
• Homepage news, latest discussions and user bar including login/logout/PM’s etc all "integrated" with our forums (IPB 2.3.x)
• Latest files pulled from our Files script (using RW::Download 4.x)
• Articles section is possibly the most mind-bending code I’ve ever written. I opted to roll my own code and have set categories for articles to be placed into. Date archive is dynamic, and articles can be linked to games in our Databank using TV’s, so everything interacts and each article has it’s own menu linking through to that game’s pages - do a search for something like "Aftermath", click through and you’ll see a rather large game-specific menu on the left powered by Wayfinder called from inside a snippet. I could’ve used Ditto for much of this, but needed something more customised and integrated with our forums, so each article is linked to a forum discussion for comments adn the latest 5 appear at the end of each article.
• The aforementioned Databank contains Games, Series and Projects, with the lists and menus again automatically generated using Wayfinder and a lot of my own code
• The shop page interfaces with a constantly updated (well, every 5 minutes) feed from GamersGate offering the latest pricing on any of the games in our Databank. You’ll see live pricing when viewing a game’s Game Card page as well
• The Contact Us page actually creates a new thread in a special forum in the staffroom on our forums, so any admin can deal with the enquiry

Sadly, I’ve not yet finished the matching themes for the forums and files sections, so I apologies for the jarring transition into the old theme when viewing those sections. I’m trying to obtain the latest version of the download script and finishing off some other code before I upgrade the forums to the new 3.x branch before theming those sections.

All in all I probably only wrote a few thousand lines of code across half a dozen snippets, but porting the content - even with the help of a conversion script I wrote - took most of the time, more-so since I spent weeks checking over the content to make sure links were working and images were correctly linked. ocPortal, whilst great for our needs at the time, was not and easy CMS to convert that much content from, and the amount of new functionality I decided to code into the new site certainly did me no favours either

As with all personal projects that aren’t making you any money, your focus does tend to drift more towards the paying projects and the site has taken me about 18 months to re-launch in MODx including all coding, designing and migrating.

It was fun - very much more so towards the end, but not an experience I ever wish to repeat. Unless someone pays me of course

Great work,

Would love to know what mods you used to port over the IPB stuff onto the modx site and are they available for IPB3 as most of the core code has changed for that, I’m in the process of building a forum with IPB3 for a client site powered by Modx so any input would be great.

Paul

Nice site you got there mate!

How did you do the categories for the articles? Are they tags in TVS, document containers, or custom database entries?

cheers/k

congratulation on a great site, it really looks ace.

I’m current considering undertaking the development of a community arts gallery site with MODx so would be interested to hear how you feel MODx supports community type sites. I’ve build a number of small business and organisation type sites with MODx but would like to get my teeth into something a little different

Thanks for the kind words folks.

Paul - IPBWI for IPB 2.3.6 stuff. I’ve got my eye on IPBSDK 3 for IPB 3 but it’s still in the early stages yet. The programmber behind it seems much quicker though so I’m hoping the basic functions I need will be available by the end of the month.

kongondo - the article categories (Interviews/Reviews/Previews/Chat Logs) are containers, and they’re pretty much the only categories articles will go in unless we ever do an editorial section, so a TV tagging system for that seemed a bit overkill as this sets up the url structure with no extra code required. The E3 Expo section is a variation on that theme. I actually made it so that MODx treats any new page in the Articles root container that’s not one of the four main categories so that it automatically treats them as a game expo and expects it’s sub-pages to be year categories for that expo, so you get E3 Expo -> 2004 for example. There were other ways of doing it, but since the structure isn’t going to change for that section it just seemed easier to do it that way. Still had to write lots of code for the menus and archives, but it works.

modx Powered - It suits my needs fine. A lot of people who want to use MODx as a site CMS and have a forum might want the MODx users and forum users integrated as one, but I kept them separate as a) it’s a big headache and b) there’s only a small amount of staff members who would need access to the CMS so I can just create them a separate account. That way you also have the added advantage that if the forum software suffers from some sort of security vulnerability, you’re not leaving MODx open to it because of that integration.

It would be possible to change the registration system to automatically create a MODx web user as well as the forum account fairly easily, but then you run into the usual synchronisation issues with passwords etc and for this particular project I didn’t need it. If I did, I’d probably emulate the "Edit Profile" functionality of the forum software actually outside of that software and use the forum integration tools (IPBWI/IPBSDK) and MODx API to ensure that things like passwords and email accounts are properly synchronised across both systems that way so I don’t have to hack either system’s core code to make them play together. Hope that all made sense

With MODx, I’ve found that what I can do is limited only to what I can imagine. There were certainly things (code-wise) in this project that I had no idea how to do before I started, but I got them done through some research and perseverance.

I’ve looked at Frameworks (CodeIgniter and CakePHP) and Libraries (Spoon looked rather nice) but for getting things done quickly where I’m the sole developer such as with this site, MODx gives you such a head start that it’s a no-brainer. Part of that is familiarity with MODx and fear of change for sure, but MODx still puts you miles ahead for certain projects.

I do have other projects lined up in my head that could be huge and potentially have tens of thousand of pages, but for the proof of concept to get people on board and get some investment I’ll be coding them myself on top of MODx Evo. If/when they get enough interest, I’ll then pay a far more skilled PHP developer than I to build a tailored solution.

It’s just such a flexible, quick and easy system to work with and so insanely cost-effective for my hair-brained ideas

With MODx, I’ve found that what I can do is limited only to what I can imagine. There were certainly things (code-wise) in this project that I had no idea how to do before I started, but I got them done through some research and perseverance.

I’ve looked at Frameworks (CodeIgniter and CakePHP) and Libraries (Spoon looked rather nice) but for getting things done quickly where I’m the sole developer such as with this site, MODx gives you such a head start that it’s a no-brainer. Part of that is familiarity with MODx and fear of change for sure, but MODx still puts you miles ahead for certain projects.

cool site, great work. very good testimonial as well...

Hehe, well I started writing that paragraph and it sort of turned itself into a testimonial without much help from me It’s all true though.

One day when I do a project that makes me some decent money I’ll be sure to donate (or maybe when my lonas are paid off next year).

Yeah, really nice site. I especially love the "Databank" feature where you can pick a game and see all the stuff you have about it, nicely organized at the left hand nav menu. Good job!

Noticed minor issues with the menu though.. If you take a look at "UFO Aftermath" for example and you land at the "Game Card" page. The navigation there is:

* Game Card
* Interviews (4)
* Reviews (1)
* Chat Logs (3)
* Files
* Forum
....

Then if you click on "Interviews" the menu changes to:

* Game Card
* Reviews (1)
* Interviews (4)
* Chat Logs (3)
* Files
* Forum
....

So Reviews and Interviews have changed places. Then select one interview article and the menu changes to:

* Game Infosheet
* Reviews (1)
* Interviews (4)
* Chat Logs (3)
* Files
* Forum

So "Game Card" is now "Game Infosheet".. Didn’t look what else in the menu possibly changes, but noticed this at first glance.

Little bit tweaks to be done here and there, but all in all looking very good. (Liked your other mashup site too btw keep up the good work!)

Great site. I love the design.

Great work! That’s a pretty content rich site!