I'm a bit new to this whole webmaster business, and particularly new to running a gaming community, but I've been around MMOs for awhile and I am building up something new that I really hope appeals to people in the longrun. Basically I am looking for help in structuring my website so that all my pages are being utilized properly. In essence, I feel that there is little need for certain pages, while others are shared. Here's some background information and perhaps you can help me...

"Impact Gaming" is my gaming community. It has a frontpage at my host root (http://5thedition.net) with a really snazzy wordpress template that I absolutely love. It then will have links to the phpbb3 forums (http://forum.5thedition.net - shared by all guilds in the community), and each guild's own subdomain (ie http://ffxiv.5thedition.net / http://rift.5thedition.net) as I add more organizations to the community. Within the community I plan to be host to a number of guilds from various games. Each guild should have its own separate news, DKP, recruitment mods, etc. To do this I am currently using EQDKPlus (it's slow, but it has all the goodies I want for guild management and there's no other packages that are as active that I have found). Each guild's subdomain has whatever links they wanna add to the game's wikis/community sites/etc, and then our community forums. The problem is I feel this is sort of a roundabout way of doing things just so each guild has it's own DKP, recruitment blocks, application process, etc.

So here's what I've tried:
  • bbDKP: A really simple mod that on the surface appears to have great functionality. unfortunately it's a bit buggy and while it says it supports multiple guilds and multiple DKPs, I cannot for the life of me get the filters to work with multiple guilds. My other fear is putting the DKPs for every guild all in one basket and if something bugs out, everyone suffers.
  • phpbb3 portals: Offer everything but the specific guild stuff I'd want. Also they are "behind" the forums, and thus the forums themselves don't display in the frame of the portal itself, it just redirects you to the forums (what's the point then gdit?). So I don't get any link backs and I doubt people want to use the portal for anything in particular. It essentially does most of the stuff EQDKP+ does, but without guild management tools. So it's kinda worthless..
  • EQDKP+: Where do I begin? It's slow, little buggy, but relatively easy to use once you get the hang of it. I really have no issues with it other than the fact that it doesn't support anything other than simpleDKP unless you code your own plugin for it. I've tried to get the admins over at the site to help me make something for XIV but it seems like all they care about is WoW. Everyone asking for support for non-WoW games gets the "that feature will be in the next patch" response, and when you ask when the next patch is they say "when we release it. maybe a year or two." I find that quite irksome.


On top of these problems, I feel like my sitemap is a mess (check spoiler tag for what I feel it looks like...). It's like Wordpress > satellite out to guild sites > which all lead to forums but never link back to anything else (although we do have a community links resource post, I feel like that doesn't really help unless you know where it is). I guess something I would also like to have is some sorta mod for the forums that let me have a sidebar (I've found no working one to do this) that has links to all other pages on the site itself.



What is my best course of action here to do all this? I just can't seem to figure it out on my own. I want a number of things, as you can tell from above, but am not sure what the best route to take is. So I've come here for some help BG. Please help!

If other info is needed, please let me know ; ;

Note: I know all about GuildWork so just put that aside for a moment. In the past I threw a lot of suggestions at Stanislav and he seemed really on top of things, but for now, my guys like being on their own sites, and we've even gotten compliments that we aren't running the website on a stock site. I really enjoy running my own website too and having a lot of cloud storage for things other than guild management and that is the primary reason I feel I want to get this up and running in a smooth fashion.