| Building an online community can be a daunting task. Countless different applications are
available for you to use as the foundation of your community. When I first envisioned this book,
I saw that online communities were primarily based on three different types of applications:
content management systems, bulletin boards, and blogs. I then found three open-source applications
that fit into these categories that I believe are at the top of their class. Let’s take a closer
look at each of the categories and the selected application.
A content management system, or CMS, is an application that can be used to deal with
various methods of web publishing. A CMS can generally be customized by adding or removing
specific features, so that the end result is only those features that you want for your community.
Features included with a CMS can include file management, photo galleries, private messaging,
discussion forums, articles, polls, and much more. Many online newspapers, magazines,
and other news sources use a CMS for their web presence. You’ve probably been a user of a
CMS without even realizing it. An extremely popular web site built around a CMS is http://
slashdot.org/. In the first portion of this book, Robert Douglass will teach you about the CMS
named Drupal. You can find the official web site for Drupal at http://www.drupal.org/.
Bulletin boards, also known as forums, are a medium in which users can post messages
and reply to those already posted. Bulletin boards are a great medium for creating a community
where users interact to help each other out with a particular subject, or just to discuss
common interests. Bulletin boards exist across the Internet, discussing everything from automobile
repair to web hosting. Today’s bulletin boards allow you to have customizable user
profiles, embed images in your posts, generate polls, and host private and public forums, just
to name a few features. In the second section of the book, Jared Smith will cover everything
you need to know to get started with the phpBB bulletin board package. You can find the official
web site for the phpBB project at http://www.phpbb.com/. |
