Worldcubers.com
After completing a simple database search application—as described on my last post—I thought I’d expand it a bit more. Many of little brother’s friends, and most of the speedcubing community in general, have grown frustrated with FaceBook, and are seeking a new alternative for their community needs. I decided, that if I were to evolve this simple search algorithm into one that allows any and all speed cubers to make and host their own website this I might be able to remedy this. I decided to use WordPress as the crutch of the user’s front end development, as it is relatively easy to use, heavily documented in its back end development, and relatively open source.
As such, after searching for an ID, if it is valid, and after another round of processing, it would go about creating a WordPress website based on the speedcuber’s information. The website’s username would be their ID, and the website’s title would be their name. With these set, the user can define pretty much anything else. Now that I had an idea, it was time to get to work.
After a bit of research, I stumbled across a preexisting WordPress auto installer, in which all one had to do was entire in an email, password, file directory, database information, Site title, and username. After some heavy retooling, I was able to fit this script to my needs, by removing some of the unneeded flexibility, such as the database information, and replacing it with the correct information (the only database it will ever connect to is the one I’m making). I decided it would be best to host this new website on mine, and as such, using WinScp and Putty, I created a server and added in all of these elements into a new folder in the server. However, when testing, I discovered an issue with this solution. Because I was hosting this site whenever I would call my search script, rather than going to the Worldcuber’s search script, it would attempt to find the version on my website. To fix this, I had to modify some of the internal calls so that they would only call the version on the worldcubers site. I also had to move all of the site’s files into a new folder called www, although I have no idea if this would always be the case. Luckily, this worked and I was back to where I started.
For the next couple of days I was busy reading up on PHP and mySQL as well as browsing through forums to find the best method to accomplish these tasks, and after many hours I must conclude, that PHP is far more unintuitive than I previously thought. YEt, after a couple days, I was able to successfully get all the needed information, as well as call the script to create this new site at the desired location and database.
With all that done, all I needed to do was make this new site much more user friendly. Following the theme of WordPress, I created a WordPress site and used that to host my scripts to make the pages look far better. I also added in a Forum page for discussion, as well as a user login and registration system, which I tied into my database scripts. With all that done, I’d say I’m finished for now.
Feel free to check it out over at worldcubers.com