[andersson]

PurposeGames is one of my sites. It’s basically a site for anyone that wants to learn something new in the most efficient way possible; by creating a game around that very subject. It allows for anyone to easily create games and play/rate games by other members. I’ve actionscripted a game engine and a game creation module to allow for anyone to create games via their own pictures and drag and drop.

I use bbpress for the forum section, and actually liked the user handling so much that I kept the authentication engine for all of the site. I’ve extended it in the following manner:

– Elaborating on the bozo concept to exclude games created by a bozo, ratings doesn’t count for bozo’s and comments to games by bozos gets treated like forum entries by bozos.

– Added a vast number of statistics to the dashboard to see what member’s are doing, creating, rating, commenting, forum entries, top lists etc.

– Extending profile pages to show member’s games, comments to the games created by member etc.

– Keeping the base of the style of the forum, extending it to fit the way I like my site to look.

Concepts I like most about bbpress include the sanitize methods (very fast, perfectly implemented in my opinion), the user object; extending it is endless and very easy with the meta-concept, the tags concept, and the bozo concept and of course the table-free layout. The Akismet utilization is very nice also.

Concepts that I’ve excluded or re-written: Db-connection open/close (not optimized for my type of site), the plugin concept (my extensions are therefore “include”-based i.e. I’m not utilizing the various hooks available). I have not cluttered the code of any standard files with my code, other than adding an include statement where needed. I also had to re-route the “include header”-call of the admin panel to be able to add new parent sections to keep child sections. No biggie really but quite strange.

I rate bbpress as 4 out of 5 as code architecture goes being able to extend it and to use it as authentication foundation. Near superb. As forums goes, it falls into the category of “less is more, but not enough”

Check my way of using bbpress at http://www.purposegames.com

Feel free to comment on what you like and don’t like. Thanks.

David Andersson

Creator of purposegames.com

[fel64]

You’ve got a really nice eye for the design of the site. It’s rare to see something so nicely designed and functional.

The main column of games could be a bit more highlighted, though; with the strong coloured backgrounds the left colum distracts a lot. Worth it for the login form, but in my opinion not for stats.

How did you get the /profiles/X thing to work? Haven’t tried it myself, but it would be interesting to know how much modification it took to have bb accept that – if any?

[andersson]

Thanks for the praise and also for the tip on the middle column. Haven’t really thought of it before but you’re probably right about that one.

Regarding the /profiles/x it is really a simple mod. You could do it in a number of ways really, where I chose the following:

Add a row in .htaccess steering the call to the logic:

RewriteRule ^profiles/?$ mods/profiles-by-letter.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]

Personally I put the logic of all mods in separate files in a mod folder and the presentation in another to keep it clean.

The rewrite rule of .htaccess makes “x” a GET-parameter to the logic, it’s then very easy to select all members starting with letter given by “x” like so:

SELECT * FROM bb_users WHERE user_login LIKE '$first_letter' ORDER BY user_login LIMIT $limit

That’s it. The logic part then calls the presentation which can use the result in an array or whatever format you choose for the result.

[wmarcy]

Any chance you could show us the code for your admin stuff?