Helpful Talk

I’ve built a couple discussion forums websites in the past few years, they were plain installations of phpBB (phpbb2 and phpbb3), which is a great software by the way.

You basically go to the website, and there you see a list of all the discussion forums; simple and straight to the point.

I am about to create a new discussion website, and I was thinking how nice it would be to have a front page. But what should  a front page to a discussion website be? Does it take away from the nature of the site, which is purely a discussion website?

Could the front page attract more readers in hopes of turning them into contributors?

I investigated using wordpress, to simply install word press on the root directory and then install the discussion forums under a directory like /forums/

Using worpress as the front page seemed appealing because I like wordpress. However, after further investigation I found that it may be hard to make the front page dynamic.

There is something to be said for simplicity here..

Let’s stop here and ask the question, why.  Why do I want a front page? Here’s a list of the features I want to add by using a front page:

• Show the latest posts
• Show most active posts
• Show a user list
• Show a website announcement or two.
• Show rss feeds from other sources
• Show links to other websites
• Be neat and clean
• Show Ads or suggested products for sale
• Directs people to the forums often

Getting wordpress to interact with phpBB was an effort I was not willing to take, let alone managing software upgrades.

Luckily, as I expected, someone else had thought of having a front page for a discussion forum and it turns out a few have been built.

These are the best 5 front page modifications for a phpbb discussion forum:

http://damysterious.xs4all.nl/portalxl/portal.php?style=30&style=1

http://www.phpbbireland.com/phpBB3/portal.php

http://alphaportal.net/index.php

http://phpbb3portal.com/

http://board3.de/

Some are more sofisticated, some are slower loading. I will investigate these and probably use one of them on my forums website.

If you have any experience with any of these please let me know.

Blogging, CMS & Wikis, Web Development Forums, phpBB, Social Media, WordPress

Open source software such as Content Management Systems (CMS) were embraced initially by individuals followed by non profit organization and corporations and now government agencies all over the world have joined the Open Source band wagon.

The New Zealand Ministry of Justice is adapting open source strategies. Barry Polley has authored the Ministry of Justice Open Source Discussion Paper which was just released.

“In summary, the adoption of OSS can lead to a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective IT environment, and should be pursued for pragmatic reasons. OSS adoption is not a panacea, and should proceed or not based on a particular package’s merits. Given two equivalent packages, one open and one proprietary, the OSS one would be the preferable choice for reasons of better supportability and lower lifecycle cost.”

Read the full article here

Just as governments, schools, NGO’s and even large corporations all use open source CMS software you should also utilizes open source software to help you publish articles, reach your audience, get your name out there and build your platform.

CMS & Wikis CMS

I am helping a friend build a website and the topic of which CMS software to use has come up. In previous articles here, posted about a year ago I compared Joomla, Drupal, Xoops, Life Ray, Typo3, Word Press etc as a CMS. Back then I decided that Drupal was the best fit. Find one article I wrote on the topic a year ago here. I went ahead and learned Drupal then built a community website that has 150+ users now. I also built a knowledge base system for my workplace that is being used and is getting very high reviews. It’s needless to say, I quickly became a Drupal fan.

Now, a year later, I decided to take a quick look and see what has changed since the last time I visited other CMS’s.. Also I am reconsidering using Word Press as a CMS for my friend’s project because Word Press continues to impress me, I love that GUI and simple upgrade process.

I am looking at Pligg, Joomla, Drupal and Word Press this time around. I quickly removed Pligg of my list, it just wasn’t mature enough, yet.

So, to start with, here’s a list I created on CMS Matrix, I did update it a little after I found a few errors. What’s interesting is that despite how far Word Press has improved in the last couple years, this list has information from 2007 and WP version 2.2.1 so it is very outdated. Keep in mind that as of the date of this article WP is at version 2.7.1

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CMS & Wikis, Web Development CMS, Drupal, Joomla, Pligg, TYPO3, WordPress, XOOPS

Recently I had to setup a Drupal website (Drupal 5.7) that needed to display pages with a location and a Google map. I could achieve that by editing node.tpl.php but I wanted to use Views and Panels instead.. Here are the instructions on how to get your Gmap view to work with the Views module and the Panels module.

Before we start I assume that you have installed the Views, Panels2, Gmap, and the Location modules.

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CMS & Wikis Drupal, Gmap, Google

For those of you who work in the professional IT arena, you may run into a project that requires developing a Knowledge Base system. I compiled this document to include all the features found in commercial solutions marketed as Knowledge Bases and am donating it here to be published on Useful Talk dot com.

It is worth mentioning that in many instances Knowledge Base solutions are also marketed as: Help Desk, Customer Support, Company Intranet, Employee Training, Document Management, CMS, and Team Collaboration tools.

This document is by no means the guide to Knowledge Bases, it is what I believe to be an accurate representation of a KB system. Feel free to reuse this document but you must always give credit to me and link back to Useful Talk or to this article.

The main features of a Knowledge Base system are:

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Knowledge Base

If you’ve read my previous posts you’d know by now that I’ve been sifting through Open Source solutions for many years. In a way, I was looking for that Ultimate Super Solution to my every web need.

My Ultimate Super Solution (USS) would have been able to act as a Web Portal, a Blog, a Forum, a Knowledge Base, be Wiki-like, a Document Authoring tool, a Content Management tool, a Project Management System, and an eCommerce system. Additionally, it has to come with all the latest Social Networking tools, and be FREE.

Many stand-alone applications exist today that are excellent at what they were designed for. For instance, take Word Press, it is arguably the best Blogging solution today that is Open Source and free of charge. Additionally, phpBB and vBulletin were designed to be a discussion forums and they are arguably the best Forum solution out there today. Similarly, osCommerce and its cousin ZenCart are the best eCommerce solutions. For wiki’s I’d say that WikiMedia is the best Wiki engine.

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal

Over the past couple years I tested more Open Source solutions than I can remember. I was looking for an Ultimate Super Open Source tool that could do everything I imagined (Blog, Forum, Page Collaboration, Content Management, Wiki, etc..) While I couldn’t find such a perfect tool, I came across wonderful Open Source solutions that I became a fan of, such as phpBB, WordPress, MediaWiki, Moodle, and Drupal.

Right now, I have a couple projects I’ve been researching, one of these is a Knowledge Base that we urgently need at my workplace, the other is a personal project that would serve as a community website where collaboration on authoring documents is crucial. In essence I am looking for something similar to: Knowledge Base, a Wiki, a Content Management tool, a Discussion platform and a Blog.

As I searched literally hundreds of wikis, content management systems (CMS) and other solutions in quest for the best, I neglected to notice how powerful WordPress was. Could WordPress be The solution I’ve been looking for that’s been staring me in the face for years?

Today, I had an idea that blossomed into an exciting question. What if I used WordPress (WP) as a Knowledge Base (KB) and as my Community Document Collaborative Authoring tool?

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Knowledge Base, WordPress

As stated in a previous post, selecting the right CMS for you isn’t easy given all the choices out there. Since my last CMS post, I’ve spent countless hours researching and narrowing down the CMS options. I now have narrowed my choices down to Four CMS engines.

It’s time to start installing an testing each of these. I have already installed and tested phpNuke and dotNetNuke; to tell you the truth, I was not impressed. I attempted to install TYPO3 but it was a pain and after a couple hours I quit; but I’ll give it another shot this week. SilverStripe is off the list now since it’s not a 100% free of charge. I also found a CMS called BitWeaver that impressed me so I added it to my finalists list.

Before delving into these, it’s worth reading comparisons and opinions that others have written to compare these Four CMS options. The following is a list of comparisons between Drupal, Joomla, SilverStripe and Typo3 that other’s have wrote:

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3, XOOPS

Below you will see a comprehensive comparison between bitWeaver, Drupal, Joomla, Liferay, Midgard, TYPO3, WebGUI, Xaraya, and XOOPS:

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal, Joomla, LifeRay, SilverStripe, TYPO3, XOOPS