The Blog of Lucien Stals

The site I’m working on is an online game which uses a similar format to the werewolf game I experimented with.

But it’s got a few more bells and whistles. I tried getting one of the off-the-shelf Content Management Systems (CMS) to do the job for me. They all have forums that come as part of the core CMS, or as a plugin, and should be able to give me the bells and whistles too. But the thing that let them all down was user management.

I tried Drupal, Joomla and Xoops, and in the end was frustrated with all of them.

The main things is that they all seem to start from a caring and sharing point of view: a community site has content that you want *everyone* to see. So they tend to default to giving everyone permission for everything, and then you need to apply restrictions. And it can be devilishly tricky to apply permissions on a user-by-user basis in many of them. You can create special groups and apply permissions to them, then assign a single user/player to that group. But you end up with a 1:1 relationship between “groups” and “users”. It’s crazy.

I need a system that let’s me control access on a user-by-user basis, as well as by groups, and assumes nobody can see anything until I say otherwise. Yeah, it sounds control freaky of me, but it necessary to run a game where privacy of certain information is crucial.

So in the end I gave up. Since the heart and soul of the game is a forum, I installed PHPBB3. It’s just a forum, and it does all the permissions I need. I know that from running the werewolves game where secrecy was everything. I can restrict permission on a user basis if I need to.

Around that, I have written a few stand alone pages which implement my bells and whistles.

The funny thing is that I tried this just to see how hard it would be. I assumed that the CMS’s out there were going to make my life easy when it came to managing users etc, and that a DIY solution woudl be more work than it was worth (I *hate* reinventing the wheel, when I don’t have to).

But in 24 hours, I got further with my own cobbled together custom solution that I had in the last month playing around with various CMS systems.

So now the “experiment” looks like it’s going to be the site I go live with

I recently installed phpbb3 and was hoping they had improved the way mods were applied, but it seems not. You still need to manually apply the mods yourself.

But at least they have improved the way the instructions are presented.

The mod I down loaded (ACP Add User MOD)came zipped with an XML file and an XSLT for it.

You just need to open the XML file in your browser, and that page gives you the instructions for installing your mod. In my case, that just involved uploading some new files to specific locations (given in the instructions) on my server, then enabling the mod (instructions also provided in the XML file).