Wallanet Launches Sports Community Network

Wallanet was brought in to turn a network of sports news sites into community sites. The site owner wanted their user base to be able to create their own personalized home pages, write blog entries and comment on other people’s blogs. In addition they wanted to continue to use all of the news content which consisted of headlines, products, and team schedules and stats.

The challenge with this project was in integrating an open source community software solution into a network of 129 individual websites. The site owner needed to be able to control all of the 129 websites from one admin interface and Wallanet needed a way to keep control of the code. Updating 129 separate websites with code changes wasn’t feasible. So with a little ingenuity Wallanet re-wrote some of the backend code and was able to use one set of code for all 129 websites.

For this project Wallanet choose Elgg.org’s open source community software package. As far as community software packages are concerned it’s under developed and light weight, however it’s released under the GPL, which means it’s free to use and modify. Since the project required running the software on 129 separate domains, it made using software with a licensing fee prohibitive. In addition, the functionality that Elgg offers met the requirements of the project so it was a good fit. To learn more about Elgg you can go here: http://www.elgg.org

To see some examples of the sports community sites you can go here:
http://www.nbabasketballonline.com
http://www.nflfootballonline.com
http://www.mlbbaseballonline.com
http://www.protennisnews.com
http://www.bostonredsoxfansite.com
http://www.sanantoniospursnews.com
http://www.newenglandpatriotsnews.com