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

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

It is undeniable that choosing a content management system depends on a variety of criteria that depends on the scope of your project. Choosing a CMS can be a long and difficult process, especially since there is a large number of content management systems available. In Europe alone, you have around 500 systems to choose from. Some of these CMS solutions are very similar and comparing them will require taking hundreds of variables into consideration.

The good news is, whether you are looking to manage content in a large corporation, university, non-profit organization, a small business or even a government agency, there is likely a well suited Open Source CMS solution for you.
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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal, SilverStripe, TYPO3, WikiMedia WYSIWYG Editor, WordPress, XOOPS