I've hosted my last 3 or 4 guilds' websites with SiteGround (Web Hosting Services: All-inclusive website hosting package, Free blog and CMS, Free domain, top customer care. SiteGround - the best Web Space Hosting Provider). Never had any bad experiences.

So, since our webmaster stopped playing, meaning little support when stuff on the site goes wrong I've decided to simply make a new one. I want to gather as much functionality as possible to our site: Forums, DKP database, and Raid signups are the most important ones but some kind of front page/newspage would be nice aswell.

I got experience with SMF ( Home of SMF: Free PHP and MySQL forum software ) for the forums, EqDKP for DKP management and for raidsignups we currently use Raidar ( Raidar - plan and organize World of Warcraft raids ) but that's a external tool and I would love to replace that.

What we use as forums doesn't really matter, I like SMF and would probably only change if something like a great signup tool required some other forum software to work.

EqDKP is nice, when it works, I've recently had some troubles with it and are currently unable to add any raids to it. So i can use whatever DKP software avaible aslong as it's not tied to any special DKP system like Suicide Kings or so.

Signup software is something I really haven't tried out yet, and don't even know what's out there.

What do people use and why that one over other alternatives?

We use phpraid for signups, seems to work well enough

I also spent alot of time thinking about an optimal solution.

There are of course full hosting package providers, which might be a decent solution for some guilds without the know-how or to prevent costs.
But you should always keep in mind: those sites are not offering their service for fun, which mostly results in advertisement spam on your website. I would not want that on my guild site, except if I put the advertisements there.
Additionally there is always the risk of the provider stopping its service which leaves your guild without its website. I mirror our website and sql-dumps to another server frequently via cronjobs to avoid data loss and to have redundancy if something fails.

While a complete hosting package might be exactly what you are looking for, I will still write something about my own experiences. Maybe someone else reads the thread and finds some impressions or ideas for his own solution.


If you want to keep it on your own server, you are always stuck with the issue of single-signon.
In my previous guilds, you had to register on different forums, for the dkp system, for the raid planner, and so on... There was always trouble because someone - mostly new applicants of course - mixed up the logins, or did not visit some of the sites at all.

So since the founding of our guild, my goal has always been a single account for every part of the guild website and since we started with only a forum, the forum accounts are chosen to be the user database for every other application.

By the way: Communicate to your members to chose their passwords safely... It's really scary if you just try the passwords of some applicants who once registered on your forums but who were denied, on the forums of their new guilds. Of course, I do not save passwords in cleartext, but in the days of rainbow tables it's so easy to crack md5 or sha1 hashes... If you want your own forums to be private, tell your members to think about their passwords. From a security point of view all those accounts in different forums are really a security nightmare...

PunBB has been my favorite forum software for a loooong time now, although I really miss the good-old tree-view forums which allow discussions to fork into different directions. Well, I think I could discuss for hours about software, so I will skip this here and just consider punBB as my forum-of-choice.

So we started with only the forum and did our raid planning and signups via forum (we still do). While this is more work for the planner, something I delegated to active members of the guild, it has the big advantage of bringing every user to the forums. Today, I can say that every single member of our guild visits the forums or website at least once a day (okay, I'm tracking every access, logging some data and creating statistics to see if someone shares his account with a foreigner, but that's a different topic too.. I know I'm evil).
I have never seen such a forum activity at any other guild i've been in and i think it's the result of doing the planning via forum.

Well, back to topic, what do most guilds desire for their website?
- a discussion board (forum)
- a news page with a CMS to add news without having to edit code
- a comment system to bring "life" onto the site
- a gallery system to post screenshots and share (member)-pictures
- a raid planner
- a dkp overview
- some pages of content (progress, member overview, charter...)

Well, for forum systems there are plenty which will do the job and some even have a built-in portal software and can be extended with gallery plugins. This can be enough for your requirement, but it depends on the forum choice of course.

With my choice being punBB, which is pretty simple and clean, I had to find a different solution for the website.

So i did some CMS System research and tried everything from mambo and it's fork joomla over typo3 and even some blogging software like wordpress or nucleus. But everything was either far to complex for my needs or did not integrate well enough. The result was, that i changed my approach and just thought - "well, i have a forum, this allows me to post new topics and others to write answers (comments) - isn't this already a cms?" (okay, to be honest the Last Resort page gave me some impressions ;-) ). So i just wrote a few simple php pages which directly read the data from the forum database which was basically just taking the extern.php of punBB and rewriting the SQL code with some nice join statements to fetch what i needed. It also made the other pages of the website easy to add, like a movie section, which is the same as the news website with another forum id to get the topics from. For things like the member site, you can do wonderful things with blizzard's armory data. ;-) But do not request the data on every pageload, run it via cronjob every few hours and only display the cached data, to reduce load.

The result is a fully integrated news and comment system based on the forum software that exactly matches my needs. Some things would have been impossible without editing some of the punBB files (feedback on which site you are in the navigation line), but since punBB supplies new releases as patch files, it is no real problem.

As a gallery system, my choice was Singapore which is still in early beta stadium and therefor a bit bugged, but not as bloated as Coppermine. Modding Singapore to use punBB accounts only required a few lines of code.

The next thing on my list was/is the raid planner. I know there are existing solutions. There are also existing solutions for things like the guild roster.
But have you ever looked into the source code? It's awful.. wow guild roster for example retrieves all the character information in one single sql query, including the class. Then it iterates over every single member and does another sql query for _every member_ just to find out what? the class, to display a class icon... That's incredibly inefficient code and redundancy and I have seen things like this in different projects. Itemstats is another example of incredibly bloated and ugly source code. EQdkp is designed far too complicated for normal use, just to fulfill the needs of some rare configurations...

In a few words: I came to the conclusion, that nearly every existing solution sucks.

So i will implement my own raid planner based on an existing punBB installation which is almost done. A raid planner is incredibly simple and should be written in a few hours, i still don't get why some systems are sooo ugly.

We use EPGP as "DKP" system and i would still like to have some webtracking based on NRT exports like EQdkp can do, but since the addon developer himself thinks about implementing some tracking feature, I will wait a bit until I implement it. Scheduled for Wotlk.


Well maybe most of my own decisions are not interesting for you, but I just wanted to write about the way I went in detail. Maybe it's useful for somebody to invest some time and create something he really likes instead of working with bugged existing solutions, that do not work together properly.


Our website - Per Noctem

Hosted at: Domainfactory.de (vServer, special offer for their 5th anniversary)
Mirrored at: Hetzner.de (Debian Linux Root Server, also hosting our Teamspeak)

Software used:
PunBB Forum
Singapore Gallery