Fan Fiction Mod for Wordpress

Azureum

Hello!

Recently I have been looking at creating a sort of fan fiction mod for Wordpress.

I am starting with wordpress 3.0 and have a setup that works well enough, I am in the middle of designing the UI but I am in need of help with the back end features.

I'm hoping to create something fairly similiar to http://www.fanfiction.net (not the same but basically a repository for storing and viewing fan fiction). There are not many decent places out there for it except fanfiction.net right now.

I have a bunch of ideas and have only a fairly basic understanding of PHP, I can get some conditional statements and things coded and basic logic but apart from that I am not very skilled.

I am working on this but at the moment my focus is purely the UI side (HTML / CSS / AJAX / JQuery) so I am looking for some people (obviously in your spare time when you are free because I cannot afford to pay for your work - but there is always the possibility of revenue from ads relating to books and the like later).

If anyone is willing to help with this I would very much appreciate it, I'm not expecting anyone to rush to my aid I'm just going on the basis of if you don't ask you don't get so here I am asking for help.

Thanks for reading!

lowe_22

Wordpress makes it easy to publish material and is extremely versatile when it comes to defining what 'material' is. It won't take long for you to get to grips with wordpress and this sounds like an excellent opportunity for you to develop your php skills!

It sound like you already have, but start by drawing out a clear plan of the features you need to include and think about how to mould wordpress around those features. If you post a feature list I might be able to suggest some ways to accomplish some of your points.

There is also so much documentation and tutorials available online that you will easily be able to find answers to your questions. Spend some time snooping around wordpress's default themes and at oter wordpress sites to see how they've accomplished things.
Best of luck!

Azureum

Thanks for the encouraging reply!

Yes wordpress is indeed very versatile.

I am struggling at the moment to figure out a way of converting wordpress into more of a bespoke solution, as I intend to allow people to sign up and create an account username.domain.com and create stories through it.

But I would like to adjust the interface as such, or code a intermediary admin system that would allow the user to quickly post their fan fiction.

There are many little features I have planned, as I said at the moment I'm working on a UI right now, maybe once that's done I can look at nailing down the feature set.

It seems to be a bit of a niche as far as wordpress is concerned because there are next to no story mods or themes that provide what I'm looking for, so it's a good opportunity to do it.

I like the fanfiction.net site as it's a good archive, but it's not very web 2.0ey (yes I know thats not a word lol).

Ideally I'd love to replicate their upload a word document and convert it for use in a story feature, thats pretty awesome tbh and for what little I've looked into there is a class or two.

Maybe you could suggest some features, if you were going to hypothetically read/create a story, what features would you find essential to this?

Thanks for your time.

lowe_22

The most important part of creating any programme, web-related or other, is to create a complete list of essential features (leave the smaller, less important features out). I strongly suggest you write a story-board style thing of how you imagine a typical user would use your site. Don't worry about the coding until you have completely sorted out your feature-set. Once you have flow diagrams down, then try and match your feature set to the best fitting CMS (baring in mind there may not be one!) at which point you might like to try a php framework, CakePHP or other, to create a custom CMS. Yes, there is a learning curve with such frameworks, but it doesn't take long to get to grips with them!

As for any suggestions, I am not at all familiar with 'fan fiction' or anything vaguely related to such a subject, so I couldn't possibly begin to suggest features for you - as I mentioned earlier, imagine you are a user of your site and create a flow diagram of all the actions that user can do and work from there.

When you mentioned having individual profiles mapped to a sub-domain with a users own 'stories' or something, I did initially think of WordPress Multi-User. I havn't explored it much myself but it was originally conceived to allow one website to host multiple blogs. You could allocate each user a new 'blog' and allow them to publish a 'story' from their own admin panel. That way each user would technically have their own mini-site (or profile page, perhaps?) which could contain all the stories they've posted.

As for uploading word documents, is that not called copy-and-paste? Sorry, useless suggestion there, but I'm sure someone has coded a WordPress plug-in to accommodate such a feature?