Now, I'm a real idiot about this stuff. I just barely know what css and html are . . .

Our experts are Remmy, Ausrpger and Effie, I'm afraid. Remmy has some good tutorial sites for different stuff . . .

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Eisel Write with Flair!
Senior Editor, The RPG Nexxus
Co-Editor, Roleplaying Tips.com

Eisel forgot to mention my name, me and Remmy have worked together before to bring forth a fully running site using vBulletin forum software, vbadvanced portal (CMS), and quite a few new things to RP. Now you are more than welcome to email me, steve (at) review-this.net or mythotical (at) hotmail.com

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Review This - Movie Review Site
I retired from PbP gaming but making a come back with a new game that will not only surprise you but intrigue you.

I will go look at those, and email you once I have enough caffeine in my system to allow higher brain function to resume....

I like simple machines forum. It's easy to setup, has tons of features, and works well. But, it's only a forum. While it has lots of spiffy forum bells and whistles, it doesn't have article posting, keeping track of things members have/don't have, etc. If you're looking for something with more tracking features, you can try mambo or php-nuke. Neither of those will be terribly beginner-friendly.

Hope that helps!

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FREE REVIEWS of your website ... by folks who've created some of the best RPG sites available. All you need to do is run over to the Reviews Forum and ask.

And remember your Nomex undies.

Apologies for not sending that email Mythotical, it seems my email is suffering a nervous collapse right now. I did go and look at vBulletin and vBadvanced yesterday though... sadly it is beyond my means at the moment, I am resigned to using free software until such time as the others decide that they can contribute financially to the site, and given that two are university students trying to pay their own tuitions...

I have been looking at Mambo as an option for the CMS, and possibly phpBB for the forums as I am already familiar with it, but I will look at Simple Machines Forums as well.

If all you want is a forum (with email notification, dead account pruning, polls & surveys, sub-boards, etc.) then SMF will do nicely. And it's very easy to setup.

PhpBB is good, but hack-prone. I switched from it to Drupal because of all the hacks. Drupal is a fabulous piece of software to run an RPG site on -- but it is *not* for beginners. Or intermediates.

Good luck

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FREE REVIEWS of your website ... by folks who've created some of the best RPG sites available. All you need to do is run over to the Reviews Forum and ask.

And remember your Nomex undies.

We need to be able to have the site manage the work of five overly creative world authors/admins, be able to organize all their work (mainly being text files as map making falls on one individual and I get all the other graphics related stuff) The text being the basis of the rp and the world guide for it, races, locations, history etc. We won't be going public for at least three months but they are itching to get to work at what will be 'home'. This is my doing as I don't want to present a half finished rp to the community, pet peeve of mine. Then I want to establish an initial play test group of possibly a dozen or so experienced roleplayers to help hammer out the bugs we may not be seeing in the rules, character creation system and all.

So really in the end we'll need a forum and a site to handle all the documentation, graphics that go with it, and be a user friendly environment for the membership when that comes about.

The others want to all be able to actively contribute to the ongoing development of the documentation of the world, and my suggestion at this time was just to do that part through a forum, banter the ideas about and bash them into shape that way.

What I can't seem to find in SMF are some of the mods that I know I can get for phpBB. Cashmod being the biggest one. The team was discussing using it in part as a way to reward active members, by allowing them to get 'perks' for their account if not their character, custom title, the glow on name, what have you... Also as a way to allow them to know how much cash their characters have available to them to buy things etc. They want to make a trip to the market as much a part of the rp as anything else, as at this time we are working on a large city rather than an entire world (though that will most likely come with time)

Also have been trying to figure out if SMF has a way to allow me to link a character sheet to their user info when they post, I saw the Biography mod, and am hoping I can get time to look at it to see if it is customizable at all.

I have been looking at it seriously, but am a little lost at the moment as you can see.

Now if my friend who is going to host this, at least during development, will sort out why my ftp access isn't working I might actually get somewhere.

Effie said: PhpBB is good, but hack-prone.

I run three sites that use phpBB (in various flavours) for their forum content and I've never had any problems with hacks. Like all forum software, you need to keep on top of any updates that come out - something that far too many phpBB users fail to do!

I ran a small graphics/pixel art forum at one point using phpbb. We were hacked three times inside of the first couple weeks of being up. Brand new install of the latest version at that point, now fortunately I am moderately paranoid and ran back ups everyday of the forum, and kept a second complete copy of all the files on my puter but it was irritating.

The only reason I consider phpBB at all after that is I know I can get the mods I want for it, all the smells, bells and whistles anyone could ever sanely want are already out there.

I use PHPNuke for my site and it has built in PHPBB...I would think that for a CMS having both of those built in is pretty good. I found one problem I encountered is that NUKE is relies a lot on cookies....so...be careful when you first set it up.

We just rebuilt our website using Joomla, a relatively young but very robust CMS. It has a great backend and a strong support community with a lot of mods available. They have a few diff forum options, with phpBB being among them.

Joomla makes it easy for you to create an overall template for your site and the addition of content is a breeze.

I've tried phpWebthings, postNuke, phpNuke, and a few other openSource CMS's but none have so far compared to Joomla.

The URL to the Joomla site is www.joomla.org

If you have a decent webhost, they may even provide it as an auto install option. ((Saves ya from some hellacious FTP sessions and setting a lot of permissions on files.))

I wish ya luck on your site and hope it comes to fruition for ya.

Have you ever wanted to play a pen and paper style RPG online? Now you can... come check out The Tangled web at... http://www.thetangledweb.net/home

I guess I don't have much to say that hasn't been reiterated time and again, but PHPBB is so hack-prone that I know of at least two sites that were hacked because of PHPBB and both switched. Sadly I believe that PHPBB has just this gaping backdoor that the malicious folks know about and are willing to just search about willy-nilly to exploit it. Good luck in your endevors though and I'll keep my ear to the ground.

Like I said, I've been running two different phpBB forums for over a year now and they've never been hacked. True, there are sites out there that have been, but I think there's a lot of scaremongering about phpBB here and I'd just like to present the other side

Alleria has been running on vBulletin for quite a while now, but to do it legally you obviously need to shell out around 100 dollars or so, which can be painful when you are used to free licenses. We have to prod our owner for the money for our forum upgrade soon, for example.

I would recommend Joomla and Mambo, as they are designed to be user friendly for admins. In any case I would suggest setting up a test site before you do your main doman installation, and spend a week or two fiddling around with it to see how you want to organise your information, and what features will and will not work for you.

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Alleria

I have a question that relates to this topic. What features would make the perfect CMS for PbP roleplaying? I think we all know that the CMS's that are available, while get the job done, are not necessarily the best for the job.

I will say that I have run a small PbP community for several years, and have been developing a more roleplaying-centric content management system. Since it is being done in my spare time, it is taking quite awhile. It would be nice to hear some of your (collective) thoughts on what would make a management system that would work best for you and your games.

The most important part about CMS' is being comfortable with the one you chose to use. If you find yourself struggling with the way the CMS is architecturally laid out - then that CMS is not the best choice for you.

Whether it be CMSes or forum software all are prone to the possibility of hacking - Joomla also has had some pretty bad hacking stories, and so have all of the others. PHPBB though is so well known that its exploitation points are equally well known.

Now switching to an RPG-based CMS - personally I think the problem with doing that is that the RPG community simply isn't large enough to accommodate the necessary support group. One of the invaluable things about general CMS' is that you have any number of people to go to if you need help or want to do something. With the RPG community you'd have maybe two or three people who could do a half decent job with regards to mods, etc... and it'd take a long time to get them.

Most CMS' have the features that are needed to run a proper play-by-post community. I think in many ways that makes the choice between them all the much harder because they all have forum softwares, they all have private user account functions, etc...

What tends to be missing from content management systems that role-playing games probably need are things like ways to link user profiles and biographies. So the whole stats sheets, items sheets, etc. are things that most CMS won't have and most RPGs will need.

New Worlds Project has been using CMS for several years now, I had a terrible experience with PHP Nuke, and then stumbled onto e107 and have not looked back since. I like the features, I like the way it is organised, and I like the amount of control one can have with it - it is so easy to make an e107 site look unique - and that's something I can really appreciate.

I prefer it over Joomla myself because I find that the way Joomla (and its predecessor Mambo) organise content isn't the most intuitive manner for me.

e107 is located at http://e107.org

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-= AOM TealFox a.k.a Kim =-
Administrative Ops. Manager
Co-Founder of the New Worlds Project
Find out more at: http://rpgnewworlds.net

The leading open-source CMS are being put to the test in this awards contest:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/final_five_announced

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-= AOM TealFox a.k.a Kim =-
Administrative Ops. Manager
Co-Founder of the New Worlds Project
Find out more at: http://rpgnewworlds.net

phpBB has been secured very well since its early days (I started out with 2.0.6 and am on the latest, 2.0.21), and it's my forum of choice. It's free, it's a fine forum system, and most importantly you can do ANYTHING with it - being open source, all you need is a little intuition and you'll be learning how to tweak it in no time. There are thousands of mods already out there people have made, including CMS ones such as Nuke. You can also create your own CMS using phpBB.

I absolutely adore the phpBB - Take care of it and it WILL take care of you and your RPG.

I have been using vBulletin for as long as I have been working on a play by post website. However I will be honest. The websites I have worked for are more Internet play facilities in that we offer places for people to host their Play by Post games. This alone made vBulletin rather difficult when it came to what had to be done. Thus we heavily modded vBulletin to the point where most of the underlying stuff is just what has to be there. Some of what me and my fellows have coded appears on the modification boards for vBulletin, that and it offers a lot of basic and yet nice features that really make it worth its cost, which is relatively steep. However even then I don't release all my code, it tends to take to much work to give it all away, that and it seems a favored choice amongst sites that compete with us as well.

As to making a CMS for RPGs, you would need to figure out what your target audience would be and if you could find a dedicated team to keep it going, maybe put it on Sourceforge as they seem to have a active community that includes quite a few RPG fans. I guess the basic features aside from organization would be some tools and a built in forum dice roller and such.

-David-
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http://www.myth-weavers.com

Myth Yields True Hope
Woven Eternily Around Venturers Entering Risky Situations

I wrote my own using Python and Django. Django is simply amazing as a web framework. My first version was in PHP and it was killing me ... refactoring was hard and I had to do all kinds of heavy lifting myself. After about six months of struggling with PHP, I switched to Python and Django ... and never looked back. With Django, I had a complete version 1.0 in three months.

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Sandy Walsh
Creator of http://www.MyDarkSecret.com
An Online Murder Mystery Game.

This again is another option and a lot of times it comes down to what you feel most comfortable at. I personally prefer PhP for web design and web pages iv made for one reason really, I like it. I am familiar and good with it, I can get almost anything I want done with it and have some spare time. However despite even that iv considered maybe even using JSP every once in a while.

Sad thing about Python, I had come out of just learning Visual Basic a few years back and I heard people saying Python was easy to pick up, so I went for it. Well after about 5 hours of frustration I just closed it and never looked back. Since then iv gone on to learn Java and PhP. However I still have not tried to go back and learn Python. :p

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http://www.myth-weavers.com

Myth Yields True Hope
Woven Eternily Around Venturers Entering Risky Situations