Re-roll.com | Connecting gamers with friends and guilds from the World of Warcraft (WoW)

Re-roll.com is a social utility that connects gamers with in-game avatars, friends and guild members who play in the World of Warcraft (WoW). Like other social communities Re-roll allows users to keep in touch with friends, share pictures, videos, discuss game strategies, and learn more about the people they meet in game.

http://www.re-roll.com

We are hoping to get some feedback and recommendations on the usability of the site.

The following highlights some of the features of the system:

• Free guild website and hosting. A full suite of guild management tools that provides guild masters an efficient way to administer guild activities. Guild masters can easily facilitate recruitment, event planning, and member discussions.
• Real time avatar profiles. One click avatar registration allows users to seamlessly update avatar information to there online profile. Once registered people around the world can check out your gear and recruit your avatar.
• Integrated activities allows users to track the progression of friends.
• Site wide forum and guild discussion areas allow users to easily exchange game strategies and information.
• Sharing pictures and videos (coming soon) .

History

We are a team of three developers and this is our first Drupal powered site. We researched many open source CMS's such as Joomla and DotNetNuke, then finally decided on Drupal mainly because of the Organic Groups module and the large community support. We've been working on Re-roll.com part-time for about 10 months.

Module List

The site is built on Drupal 5.x and the modules listed below, and a few custom modules not listed.

• advanced_profile
• avatar_blocks
• bio
• blocktheme
• buddylist
• captcha
• cck
• feedback
• imagecache
• meta_tags
• organic_groups
• panels
• page_titles
• themesettingsapi

Lessons Learned

• One thing we would probably do differently is to deploy early and frequently (*cough agile*). We were always concerned that the site wasn't quite perfect to go into production, because of this we missed out on valuable feedback from alpha/beta testers which would have helped us evolve and prioritize site functionality.
• We've tried several free project management tools like Mingle and RallyDev, but finally decided on Unfuddle. Unfuddle is a easy to use agile project management tool, which we found to be invaluable in coordinating and prioritizing our work.
• Firebug is awesome, can't live without it now.
• There is a big learning curve for Drupal but it's totally worth it in the end.

Next Steps

• SEO and marketing. Looking to sign up users to the site and finding the most effective method to achieve organic growth.
• We still have a few features we'd like to implement, such as photo and video sharing.
• Expand Re-roll.com to handle other games like Second Life, Call of Duty and Warhammer.
• Upgrading to Drupal 6.

Final Words

Thanks for reading our spiel, hopefully sharing our experiences with our first Drupal project can help others in the Drupal community. We'd appreciate any feedback good or bad. Thank you.

http://www.re-roll.com