Over the summer I helped my friend Ludnix with a project he was working on called Reefsome. His idea was to create a reef keeping website where hobbyists could get together and share their knowledge and their hard work! Other websites like this exist, and are fairly popular, but both he and I felt like they were all very poorly executed and had some major problems with their interface. A lot of sites used portals that came with their forum software to create a front page that was integrated with their forums. We wanted to integrate the main site with the forums, but a portal system was out of the question, so I developed my own set of hooks that interfaced with our vBulletin forum software to create a truly seamless integration.

The gallery uses a pretty heavily modified version of my own Saurdo Gallery. Using my forum integration we created an environment where people could make their own personalized galleries and be able to easily post their images on the forums. One way I did this was to create a special version of the gallery that was meant to open in a tiny window from the forums. Much like the existing attachment systems in vBulletin, my system acted like the attachment system right down to the "click to add to post" buttons. Go check out the gallery!

This of course required some modification to the forums. Something that I actually became quiet comfortable with once I learned how to properly use vBulletin's hook system. I actually ended up creating a number of custom modifications for the forums. Everything from user set "max image display size" options to the aforementioned attachment system thing.

The website is pretty much finished and now everyone is just working on adding content to it. So if you have a saltwater aquarium or want to go check out my handy work then go visit Reefsome.com!