As the SCORE OS project gets off the ground, I tend to get an email or two from people that like the idea of an open source fantasy league management system. Either they want an FLMS for their personal league or because they would like to host fantasy leagues for their business or as a marketing opportunity. However, after a little discussion, they will sometimes express less interest for getting involved because of one simple reason: They don't know much about web development.

When Don and I decided to tackle the SCORE OS project, our original timeline had us converting the old Pre Pro Hoops South (college basketball) code into what would be the first release of SCORE OS. However, as holidays, real work, and life plans (engagements, physical injuries, and family issues) crept into the picture, we realized that the fantasy college basketball season was passing too quickly.

One of the advantages of moving to the Drupal platform to create our FLMS is that Drupal is developed in the paradigm of modularization. This basically means that new functionality is added to the system in "safe" blocks. All code and development takes place in a module that is then installed without affecting the code of the other modules (most importantly, the Drupal/SCORE OS Core) and can be just as easily uninstalled.

So, I came up with the idea of (well, I should say, I copied the concept of) the Facebook News Feed and tried my best to explain it. Still, I got a few questions that wanted some clarification about what the heck I was talking about.

In the past, I always came up with an idea, created a database, hooked up an ASP page/interface to it, and finally, maybe days (or weeks) later, I'd have my concept come to life before my eyes.

A question was posed to us by a prospective developer who wondered why we were pushing SCORE OS towards a LAMPD (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Drupal) stack versus the WISA (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, ASP) stack that was already used to create the Pre Pro Sports Fantasy League System. Here are the replies Don and I gave, which we think will be worth re-posting here:

wrburgess reponse:

This represents the first post for the SCORE OS project, a development effort to build an open source fantasy league management system for a variety of sports.

There are a slew of links, people, sites, and info that will be posted here in the coming days. This blog will be used somewhat as a diary to detail how the project is progressing and to allow a little interaction via push or pull for those folks interested in the progress of the SCORE OS application.