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

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

The OS community has produced very good search engine software.. Here’s a list of the most famous ones.
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Free Stuff, Search Engines, Web Development Research

If you want to learn Java, start here:

• Java Tutorials from Sun
• Java Swing Tutorial from sun
• TechBooksForFree.com
• Enhydra.org
• JavaAlmanac.com
• The Java programming language from wikipedia.org
• Learn Java programming for free, at wikibooks.org
• Free Java Network Programming Ebooks
• Free Java and J2EE eBooks
• Java books for free

Free Stuff, Web Development Java, Programming

I compiled a list of common J2ee abbreviations:
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Web Development

I used the .Net platform briefly and was impressed by the GUI and the many automated functionality.. It is hard deciding which is better. Below you’ll see links that compare and contrast J2EE and .Net.
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Web Development

Let’s keep this one short and simple. If you need PayPal logos for your online store or any website for that matter you could use what PayPal offers. But what if you still can’t find the right image? How about seeing what others have?

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Free Stuff, Web Development, eBay & PayPal

I found a website that has archives of many Web Browsers.
If you have just upgraded to IE7 and wish you could run IE6 again, or IE5, 4, or for that matter any other web browser.. Visit browsers.evolt.org
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Free Stuff, Web Development

AJAX offers a powerful web development tool that can solve various problems that websites face. It can reduce website load and make pages act more dynamically and seamlessly. Here are the best AJAX resources I found online… Enjoy:
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Web Development