Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Over the past year or so I’ve gotten many questions about how I built Singletracks.com. It appears that Singletracks is a modified forum program that allows users to register, post new topics (trails), and reviews (posts) of trails. Of course there are lots of add on features like wishlists, recommendations, etc. but at the core the site largely uses features associated with messageboard systems.

In fact Singletracks has been built almost entirely from scratch. The very first version of the site that allowed users to post their own trails was actually constructed using a Perl script for allowing users to create custom homepages. The concept has survived but all the scripts have been completely rewritten using PHP and MySQL. If I were to build the site all over again I would probably start with a messageboard script package to get the main functionality necessary to run the site.

One problem with using a messageboard application is the fact that it is tough to find a really basic bare bones set of scripts that doesn’t have alot of fancy bells and whistles. In fact, since messageboards are not exactly analagous to an information review system, you’ll find yourself making extensive modifications to get things organized and doing what you need them to do. Plus the templating schemes these days have gotten out of hand and you need to be up on the latest technology just to understand how they work (Smarty, BBCode, etc.).

The solution I’ve come up with is a set of PHP scripts and MySQL tables I’m calling the Information Review System (IRS). I’ve been using it myself for a couple of months to post some of my own review sites and it appears to get the job done. The basic scripts let you collect user information (name, email) and build user accounts that can then be used to post new information and reviews. The setup I’ve posted is organized geographically by default but one could definitely switch the country/state categories for other product categories (like media/genre for example). The owner of the script can also modify or delete listings easily using a simple web interface. Finally, the templating scheme is simple: an include file for the header and an include file for the footer. You can change these files all you want to “plop” the forms and outputs into any page format you like.

I’ll be working on adding more features to these scripts over the next several months and I welcome any feedback. Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Business, The Internets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.