Board Game Club
Description
The web site is still under construction but a basic version is up for testing purposes.
One of my passions is board games. I love them and I own tons. I have a group of friends that I get together and play games with every week. I've been wanting to organize the group a little bit more and collect data from our different sessions. Members in my group also want to see who owns which games and thus be better able to pick what games they want to play.
One of the major obstacles of the web site was getting all the data and information for each board game. BoardGameGeek (BGG) provides an excellent XML API which I was able to hook into and retrieve the data I needed. Users of the web site can search for games, BGG provides the results in XML, and PHP is used to parse through the XML and output a result list. Each result can be clicked on to view more information about the game which is again provided by BGG's XML. Images of the games are also automatically downloaded and displayed. In order to avoid hitting BGG more than necessary, the XML results are stored in a database and images saved on our server. Once a month, a script runs which refreshes all the information already collected to the newest information on BGG.
Users of the web site can also manage their game collection, create game groups, suggest games to be played, record and view session reports, and collect trophies.