Vitality is a World of Warcraft guild. For those of you that have not have the pleasure (and you really should), World of Warcraft is a wonderfully complex online game played world wide by over 10 million people. Individual gamers become members of a guild which encourages collaboration between members and teamwork for accomplishing difficult in-game tasks. Guilds typically pool information, strategies and even loot in an attempt to help each other enjoy and advance within the game. By their very nature, these guilds are a combination of social network and tribal knowledge warehouse. The Vitality guild needed a site that reflected just this combination of social and knowledge space. We delivered using a combination of WordPress, BuddyPress and Simple:Press.
WordPress provides a dedicated CMS (Content Management System) so that Guild members can publish information on strategy, helpful guides for new users and rules for the guild. Custom code was added to pull information from the internal game calendar which allows users to schedule activities within the game world. This setup provides a near perfect base for a number of additional tools.
For example, BuddyPress allows the guild to leverage profiles, friends, status updates, notifications and other aspects of traditional social networks like FaceBook. We also added some custom coding to the profiles which where tied to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Armory, providing each users profile with detailed views of all of their characters. Additionally, an RSS feed of in game achievements is captured for all Vitality Guild members and displayed on the home page.
The final piece was the Simple:Press forum which allows guild members to communicate and post helpful articles and thoughts on game play. Vitality had previously used a dozen forum topics, many of which were idle for long periods of time and often simply forgotten. In consultation with the guild we decided to shorten this to two forum topics: one for General information and one for outside resources. This server to funnel the information into fewer, yet more active, forums with the understanding that more could always be added later if they were needed.
The site has both a public face and a private section for guild members only. The private section also has a site wide alert system to notify all guild members of things like new site features, new game content, raiding opportunities and more. As with our larger database projects, all data is backed up daily and the system is monitored for outages.