Whenever I show off the Young Writers Society (YWS) to friends, family and miscellaneous associates, they often ask how much it cost to have the site designed. That is, they believe the web development of the site is professionally managed while I just administrate the whole affair. In reality, it’s pretty much the opposite.
While I do handle a lot of the big-picture stuff, the actual administration of the site is fairly devolved. In fact, there are times where I leave the site for a month at a time and everything goes on as normal. This has to do with my philosophy of letting the users pretty much run YWS. Plus, I used to be a member of a writing site that depended on constant action by the administrator. If he went a week without doing anything, you noticed.
The way the administration is set up at YWS, my role is really only to advise. In fact, the only thing I do that no one else can do is ban members. It’s up to the mods to ensure literary excellence on YWS as well as to ensure the site remains a friendly place. Then it’s up to the JMs to moderate specific sections of the board just to make sure everything is running smoothly. Because of this hierarchy, YWS is more or less self-governing.
However, when it comes to the web development side of YWS, it’s a one-man show. What I do is make sure YWS works on every browser, every time. There’s always a few bugs, but then again, there’s reportedly over a 1000 bugs in Gmail. So I don’t feel too bad about that!
If I wanted to, I could leave YWS alone. The site runs on phpBB3, a bulletin board forum. PhpBB3 is excellent for a few reasons: (1) it’s free, (2) it’s extremely well documented, and (3) the code is very well organized. So even if I left YWS alone, phpBB3 would ensure you still have all the features you want in a website from private messaging to user profiles.
Yet because phpBB3 is so well designed and coded, it’s very easy to build on top of it even though it’s not meant to be used as an internet portal program. One very famous site that does this is Gaia Online; it’s built on top of the phpBB2 bulletin board.
So very early on in YWS’ history, I began tinkering with it to give members more features. Over time, it’s been so heavily modified that you’d think that the forums were built around the site rather than the site being built around the forums. Yet, everything is done within phpBB3.
So a lot of what you see on YWS is either phpBB3 itself or me using the tools provided by phpBB3. But the real difference between YWS and mere phpBB3 forums is how the information is presented to you. On top of that, there is plenty of stuff I do with YWS using the tools provided by phpBB3 that you would not see on any other phpBB3 site (including YWS gifts and the knowledge base).
This blog will thus track the web development of YWS as well as some of the tricks I’ve designed to get around common web development problems.