EpicAdvice.com is a website built to serve the World of Warcraft community by answering their questions. The existence of WoW (World of Warcraft) websites is astronomical, but none of them that we were able to find fit the Q&A needs of the community. There are hundreds of sites that supply news, products, discussion and information out there, and they are all sites we visit daily, but one key aspect was missing: Questions and Answers. We accomplish this on EpicAdvice.com using the StackExchange engine (like many others) and some slight javascript trickery for enchanced features, many kudos to Fog Creek Software for making this possible.

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Technologies used:

• (.NET) StackExchange Engine – Powers the Q&A Engine.
• (JS) “Reputation Leveling System” – Graphical representation of reputation in a level based format.
• (JS) Wowhead.com Item Linker – Enables users to link items easily from the editor.
• (JS) Social Media Sharing – Custom insert allowing users to share questions via popular social media.
• (PHP/JS) Expanded Profiles – Users are able to link their characters to their EpicAdvice account via a custom backend.

Contests:

• July/August 2010 – Cataclysm Question Contest – $1000 in prizes distributed as a traffic initiative.
• October 2010 – 1st Anniversary contest (to be announced)

For more information, please feel free to contact our team at team@epicadvice.com.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post because I’ve been extremely tied up with projects at work up for the last year+. However, now comes a time when I want to go back, explore what I’ve learned, and in the process develop a short set of tutorials explaining it all. The tools and code that I post up are going to be used in my everyday work, things I find useful and even things to make my personal coding experience easier (hopefully yours too).

The first part of this series will focus solely on downloading the starter kit, how to pull it down from the SVN, and how to make sure your apache is configured to handle it. The rest of the series will focus on using this starter kit to make some awesome apps.

To start with, this series will assume that you have a basic knowledge of the following:

• Configuring your own local apache test environment or using a live apache server.
• Basic understanding of PHP syntax, functions and usage.
• Some knowledge of OOP, understanding of classes and methods.

Basically I will be giving you a “Starter Kit”, which will require you to have a functional PHP/Apache setup in order to run. From here on out, instead of referring to the package as the “Zend Framework Starter Kit”, I will simply be calling it ZF-Starter. You are free to use this code however you see fit, without attribution! Read on to check out all the steps in getting the code and getting started!

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