Denizens of the Blogosphere

The new front end on DDB is now about 80% of the way towards where we were before the gigantic reworking of the whole template engine to accommodate the new theme.

The good news is that this new template engine will tie in nicely to the API that will tie in to blogizen.net. With any luck…

The template engine has progressed to the point where modules can now be plugged in.

Isn’t that exciting! Not really. We’re still a long way off from being complete. The first module, a list of your characters in a sortable table is up and working. That’s about it though.

Just a short post to keep you in the loop and let you know that development is progressing.

My 3 projects took a rather large step today. I put the blogizen.net project online. It’s basically WordPress Mu with BuddyPress.

This combination should allow gamers to host and play D&D online in a blog format.

The future of blogizen.net will include a tool set that ties in dungeondb.com so you and your DM can track and edit the characters you’re playing in a blog style campaign. Pretty cool.

As it stands today, the blog style campaigns can be started and played. Characters can be created and maintained. The two sites, however, are not connected which can make things a tad complicated and will require a load of effort on the part of the DM and the players. This is not ideal.

The question is, how do I connect the WPMU user accounts to the ddb accounts? There are several approaches.

I could do a unified login and account creation, but that would limit play to the blogizen.net host only.

I could allow the player, who can have multiple characters playing in multiple games, access to their characters across multiple blog hosting sites. In which case a ddb connect (ie. Facebook Connect) solution would be a much better option. That option, however, would require that I develop a secure API that will accept 3rd party connections from a variety of different engines. I would therefore need access to people capable of developing plugin’s for those engines, specifically ASP developers as I don’t do ASP.

So while this site is up and online and dungeondb.com is up and online, the two won’t be communicating for a while.

I was originally going to leave blogizen.net offline and work on the functionality of ddb instead. Considering how easy it is to get blogizen.net online, well… what the heck. If anyone wants to get started they can.