So my latest project is a community site dedicated to race tracks. The idea is to have a searchable, browsable database of all tracks worldwide along with forums to discuss anything related to those tracks.
Off the top of my head, several things need to be built:
- track database with track submission page
- backend admin interface for track editing and submission approval/rejection
- user system (integration with phpbb?)
- IP or zipcode-based geocoding support (”Five Closest Tracks to You”)
- phpbb community forum software
- Flickr tag support to show photos related to a track
- Google Maps for all tracks for visual flair
The key to the usefulness of the site will be the size of the track database. Since I don’t want to enter details about thousands of tracks, it will be important to accept submissions from anyone and let the crowd solve the problem through divide and conquer. Users can submit information about a track to be approved. They will get credit for the submission and after 5 approved submissions, can be given moderator status to one or more of the phpbb forums. Forums can be broken done by country/native language so it’s quite possible to have 50 moderators, all of whom have submitted track information about many tracks in their country. Once we have a few hundred tracks, the site should snowball and become self-sustaining through search engine traffic and its own community.
Other feature ideas:
- Random! - show the user a random track from the database. Great for browsing on slow days.
- Store - show track-related affiliate product links from Amazon. Could even be geo-targeted.
- Google Ads - use the Flickr tags for keyword targeting
More to come!