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.

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