Thanks again guys! For anyone who has developed/is developing an indy or commercial game, what kind of community software did you use for: 1) hosting/building/attracting the development community 2) hosting/building/attracting the player's community 3) selling the game 4) publicizing the game Did anyone use nuke software such as phpnuke and postnuke? What would you recommend for building the above presences on the web. Any live community sites for indy game developers out there that you can recommend? Specifically, I'm looking for an example of a small team who is building a game and recruiting members. Basically, if you were to distribute/sell your game on a shoestring tomorrow, what kind of software would you use for the web presence? Live links to examples always rock. Thanks! Ranger :)

Nothing on the market is anywhere near good enough unless you pay thousands of dollars AND then employee people to customize it.

So...we built our own. Well, mostly *I* built it, because I was the one with years of experience making CMS's and customizing other people's.

I consider phpnuke something to use once you've lost the will to live. You tend to come back to it because it's the only thing tenable, even though you can think of ten ways it sucks beofre you even get out of bed in the morning. Given the state of the market, it's the one I suggest to people first; 90% of what else is out there is so horrifically buggy and undocumented that the authors should stop hiding behind their self-created "open source" shield and just come out and be damn ashamed of their incompetence. What little is left is never quite what you want for what you are trying to do.

There's an alpha version of a site running an alpha version of my CMS at:

http://javagamesfactory.org/views/software

(that page lists the other open-source software that it glues together, although to that list should be added tinyMCE and probably some others when someone gets around to it).

If you know any Python, I suggest taking a look at Plone (which runs on Zope). Plone is almost bearable as a contender to phpnuke, but much less widely used (although still very widely used itself!). IF you don't know python, don't bother - it's still got many badly designed or broken bits that you HAVE to know python in order to use it much / customize it / fix it when it breaks.

Thanks Anonymous!

Do you use any version control software?

If so, what kind? (CVS, subversion?)

How big is your community? Do you have any games out yet?

What do you think of postnuke vs. phpnuke?

What do you use for forums?

Best,

Ranger :)

I have quite a bit (more than I care to admit) of experience with the *nukes.
My personal preference is the PostNuke flavor.

HOWEVER, for what you want to do, I strongly suggest staying away from it.
*nuke is good small community portals such as guild/clan websites...simply because of its available modules. But like AP said, it's very poorly documented, and unless you're experienced with it, you're certain to encounter problems just getting a stock install configured correctly in a day. Above all else, however, it's HORRIBLY SLOW and TAXING on your server!

What I do now is just create a collection of the features I want, and interlink them manually. It takes time, but FAR less time than getting a stable *nuke site up and running.

Perhaps I'll put together a modular ASP.NET (or something) portal for indy software dev sites some day.... Just not today...too much else going on ATM.

e107.org's CMS is probably the best free CMS I've encountered, but you still need a decent webmaster to take it apart and add any custom features you want (and you will want them) and to handle the templates and graphics.

I do *NOT* like the any of the Nuke CMS's because they have a tendancy to be buggy and poorly documented. Then again e107 isn't significantly better in the documentation department but they write very clean code imho.