Down the Rabbit Hole, dropped into the world of PHP

Several weeks before this classes began i was put into the precarious position of IT manager of my guild in the game World of Warcraft.


This position just happen to fall into my lap being that i had the most IT experience in the guild, the next highest person once helping his grandmother install Norton over the phone. As i assumed the responsibility i delve into the makings of our website and forum systems.

Our initial main page i discovered was created using a php software package called Joomla. This software package automated many of the sites main creation and management functions. Data was created and stored in a SQLlite database held within our web server.

The forums on the other hand were created through CGI which from what i could grasp is written in Perl. While the cgi forums had initially been a success they soon began to deteriorate deleting posts and users from the SQL data base for reasons we could not understand. In addition, each needed its own authentication. Any while we never had authentication issues with the main page, there was consistent issues with the forums.

I made the decision to replace the Cgi forums with phpbb3. Prepping and installing the forum system was easier than i had imaged and it connected very well with the SQL database provided by the web server. With only slight modification we were able to unify the authentication of both the main page and the forums, as well as remove much of the requirements to see main page information that of which had required an account. The addition of phpraider, a package that installed just as easily and the bulletin boards, we had the capability or organize and create events that had previous been done through forum or email notification. The guild was very impressed with the results. The feature many like off the bat was the ability to choose a template that fitted the profile of the guild, one parsed around WoW.

All the uploading work was done with the help of the same EMU-SSH suite provided by Eastern for people.emich.edu.

Every package listed above was free, the only cost is our $4.99 a month hosting fee as well as $6.99 yearly domain registration.