I am in the process of building a new website structured like a forum. I am also trying to redefine the genre. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, but I believe that what I am doing is radically different from your average cookie cutter forum themed website. But I must digress.
I started this a few months ago. I did my research and chose a program that is designed to build websites. Originally my idea was something completely different, so I chose a program based on that idea. Keep in mind that I have never done anything like this before. I played around with Dreamweaver and Frontpage a few years ago, so I had a very basic idea of what you need to know to accomplish this. But while doing my research it was suggested to me that I use something called Drupal. Drupal is a “content management system”. I had no idea what that meant. All I knew was that I wanted to build a website, and that I had i great idea that would be very successful.
After a number of calls to my webhosting tech support, I finally had it up and running on my domain. It is the single most complicated piece of software I have ever used. It is also probably the most powerful CMS software that is available today. As a point of information, since converting to Ubuntu I primarily use open source software and Drupal is open source. The one down side to open source software is that in most cases there is no live tech support or help desk that you can call. Yes there are forums dedicated to Drupal and most if not all open source software, but when you are trying to design and implement a website, waiting for someone to answer your forum post is somewhat frustrating and it can bring your work to a screeching halt. For two weeks I stayed up many nights into the wee hours of the morning trying to figure it out. I had many “AHA” moments as well as many “Oh No” moments. Just when I thought I had things figured out, BOOM! Things just blew up on me. I have to say thought that I learned an aweful lot about what a content management system is and what it does.
So after about three weeks I decided that maybe I should hold off with building my Drupal based site, and just do a forum. On paper that sounded like a good idea. Get the forum up and running, start attracting users and build a nice base of registered users to have,to migrate into my Drupal site. As I said, it looked good on paper. Okay, so now I need different software because I have a different plan in mind. I go back to the internet and specifically to the irc chat areas where I hang out, and start asking around about forum based software, And someone gave me a great link to OpenSource CMS, a really wonderful web site where you can test out dozens of software titles specifically designed for internet and web site development. So I demoed a few different titles and settled on one called phpbb3. It did come highly recommended for its ease of use and reconfigurability. Out of the ‘box’ it really is easy to work with, the installation was a snap and its step by step initial setup made that whole process a breeze. Now it was time to design and configure my forum.
Stay tuned, more to come.
