Wanting advice about making a Game Modding website.

I'm replacing another site that a community of the madden 08 has lost making the community basicly stale. So I've been trying to figure out a good CMS to use for my site Modders paradise the site will be starting off for the Madden 08 community to get a Mod that has basicly allot of others mods mixed in to it call Football Freaks. The Reason this community has came to gather is because EA stopped releasing Madden to PC Users and it was perfect and allot of us like it more on the pc then anywhere else. Eventually though I would also like to expand the site in to other games.

Basicly I want the site to be a easy place that people can work on the mods with each other and upload the edited version of each mod until it becomes a official release, so users need to be able to upload and download from the mod vault and of course eventually I want it to support multiple game projects in the future. At first I was thinking of using the Joomla CMS as my base but it seems to be better for news and stuff not for storing files where users can download and upload a beta version that others can also work on.

Feel Free to ask me anything please keep all comments civil, and please give me as much info as you can and idea's about my website I would like to start work on it soon but right not its been up in the air because I have not found a CMS or Web forums that would work well with the kinda project that I want that would also be able to be able to support multiple Game's and their Mods. Yet also to be helpful to allow the Modders to be able to edit the mods in real time and to add them back to the site.

Any ideas would be welcome!

Thanks Mord!

So, basically http://www.moddb.com/?
If so, you could probably do it with Drupal or some other very high-end CMS.

...rather than use a CMS at all, you might be better off using something like Git - perhaps with a service like https://github.com or http://gitorious.org/ to host your repos, as they'll provide wikis and some basic discussion/community features with them.

Otherwise, perhaps a Git repo combined with a separate-ish main community powered by a CMS or even simply a forum (such as Simple Machines Forum or FluxBB), using one side for the community aspect and the other for development.

For more info about Git, check: http://git-scm.com/

You could also use Subversion or a similar version control system - Git just happens to be very popular currently.

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On the flipside, if you want to run everything through a CMS, you're likely to have to heavily customize that CMS (depending on your level of experience, you may need to hire someone or a company to do so for you - perhaps a paid CMS or a free one whose developers are available to hire to customize it). It's doable, but I don't know of any (and doubt there really are any) out-of-the-box ways to do it.

You could also always just start a forum/project on http://www.moddb.com/ for it and run it there. Not quite as custom or in your own hands, but very simple and giving you access to a large community and set of tools right off the bat.

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As for ModDB.com itself, in case you were curious: it runs on the DesuraNET Web Engine - http://trac.moddb.com/web - which is made by, you guessed it, DesuraNET, parent company of Desura, ModDB, and indieDB. As far as I can tell, they don't release their project (though you can learn a bit about it from it's trac page - hit that link) for public use.

moddb is just about what I'm looking as for when it comes down to a CMS if anyone else has any suggestion please do tell! I'm basically looking for a really good CMS that has a good back bone for hosting a download section where I can allow users to also upload mods.

But besides that all the site needs to do is like any other site is have a front page that I can post news to like with most with link to the the rest of the site & the forums built or not built in depending in the CMS. But who ever can tell whats the best CMS to use please feel free to way in it just needs to have a nice download section.

Anyways Hob Bramble you rock dude those sites will work perfectly in tandem with my site and reviving the Mod for Madden 08 called football Freaks, but of course by reviving it it would need a new name anyway it seems gitorious would be the perfect one to use with my site! I would have never found that site. Anyways I just need to figure whats the best CMS Joomla I used allot but it seems more built for blogging thats why I use it for my community's site historichampden back in the day post nuke was great so was Nuke but they changed allot over time. Anyways Feel free to give your advice!

Most CMS's are good these days, but sometimes you need to adjust the layout yourself to make your own changes. Mite be better doing some editing and add it on to the db to run off.