Fuzzy Future Technologies

TeamFnX.com – An Online Gaming Community. Team FnX is an online gaming team that competes in tournaments and events based on first person shooter based video games. They came to us, looking to build a home where their team could present information about themselves, details on their wins and losses, upload photos, music, and videos, and a have a discussion forum where team members and visitors could discuss topics related to gaming. Their only criteria was the site needed to be edgy and also be easy to maintain.

Our Approach

We immediately decided that in order to make the entire site easy to maintain, our best bet was to leverage existing time tested software solutions to build out the various features of the site. For the main site, we decided to use Drupal, which is one of the leading open source content management systems for site creation. One of the biggest benefits to Drupal is it has a huge community of developers behind it, that have already built thousands of plug-ins. Many of the features we wanted to add or the team may want to add in the future could be accomplished with an already developed plug-in. For the photo gallery, we decided to use the Gallery 2.0 package, which is a simple to use system for creating albums and posting images on a website. Finally, for the forum, we decided to use PHPBB, which is one of the most widely used packages in the world for building online bulletin board sites.

Our Expertise

The hardest aspect of this project was to integrate the many different packages so they gelled with each other as a cohesive site. We initially setup our Drupal installation and commissioned an incredible edgy design for the layout. Our next step was then to build a series of custom Drupal plug-ins that created functionality that did not previously exist. For example, we built tools for automatically updating their official competition record from TeamWarfare.com, we designed a custom roster page that profiled each competitor and allowed them to maintain their own personal blogs, and we created widgets that supported online music and audio as well as providing support for the TeamSpeak communication system. Next, we setup both the photo gallery system and the phpBB forum package, and integrated both into Drupal allowing for a single administration interface and shared login accounts between both the main site and these tools. Finally, we populated the brand new site with all of the previous articles that had been written on their old site, so the new one would maintain their existing history.

Our Results

This project was completed almost 3 years ago, and has so far been a resounding success. The members of Team FnX say they constantly stand out among the competition with a site that is unique and edgy compared to many of their competitors. Since the site has gone live, their photo gallery has exploded to more than 2000 photos and their online forum has had more than 7000 topics and almost 30,000 posts. The tools we built specifically for this site are still used today to maintain an online audio player and to allow members of Team FnX to communicate with one another over TeamSpeak. Overall, this project reached all of it’s initial goals and remains a great community for online competition.