let's say I want to make a forum that has pretty much all the functionality of a typical high end forum, like phpBB2, but I also want to add a few more features here and there. Maybe I want to add user reputation (kind of like what we have here on StackOverflow) and a button to sort threads or posts based on that in some pages.
Needless to say, I also want to do this without reinventing bicycles or rebuilding pyramids from scratch...
What is the professional approach to this? What would you do if you wanted basically a slightly tweaked, advanced web forum?
I would suggest that you take a look at Vanilla Forums:
http://vanillaforums.org/
I'm biased but I'd recommend looking at Drupal - you seem to want to build a customized system out of existing components and Drupal's module architecture lets you do this quite easily. There are lots of resources on the web for learning how to build community sites with Drupal that a quick Google search will bring up.
You can then use modules like the User Karma module to create a reputation system
Pligg, open source, seems pretty useful for features such as voting up and down posts http://www.pligg.com/about.php .
BBpress http://bbpress.org/ , integrates with Wordpress and allows for plug ins.
Also, https://stackexchange.com/ looks interesting!
Related
Which is better for web content management purposed only?
The website requirements include a user discussion forum and a poll survey with a good search facility and also needs a good SEO tool. The site should also load faster and should be easy to edit contents.
I can't speak to Jahia, but dotCMS can do everything you're asking for. Below are some links that should help you self evaluate dotCMS. I also would point out that dotCMS is more of a platform (makes a great user experience platform UXP) than an off-the-shelf solution and because of this your requirements might take a little work to setup and get running. With that being said, your finished product should meet your exact needs.
Site Search (uses ElasticSearch)
http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/SiteSearch
Performance Report
http://dotcms.com/aw/performance-report
I hope this helps.
Jahia should be able to handle these request. I am the opposite if Fish and have experience with jahia. Jahia does have a forum and poll component's both available as open source so you can modify the code when you require to.
What I like about jahia (among many other things) is that editing content is straight forward and very easy to for non technical persons. ofcourse it has all the permissions in place for all content so you can set it up in such a way that you don't have to be afraid that the non technical persons will mess-up a website.
Performance of Jahia, even without fancy caching proxies is very good and it can run on low resource VM's, just if you want to start small. I am using them on small Linode machines without any issues
I have not worked with Dotcms, but basic forums, polls, search, and SEO are all freely available as Jahia modules. The forums are certainly not as good as a standalone like Vanilla, but they are simple to add and administrate. Search is good and requires little configuration, and anything more than basic SEO is going to be custom work.
I'm a front-end designer/developer whose weapon of choice for the back-end is WordPress. Up to this point all of my projects involving WordPress were fairly basic and it has handled everything beautifully. I just landed a new client that wants some extra functionality built into his next project and I'm hoping some of you WordPress wizards can give me some good advice while I'm putting together the quote.
I'm trying to limit the need for any subcontracting for the back-end functionality, so my question is whether or not WordPress can handle the following (via plugins or light custom manipulation):
The idea behind the site is to be a community calendar based on location that Health Care providers can log in and post their events to, as well as participate in discussions, blogs and all the other WordPress goodness. The specific functionalities that I'm unsure of the best way to accomplish are:
Full featured calendar that members with access can add their own events to - must be searchable by date/type of event/location etc
Event generator module for members that integrates with calendar - includes upload field for images and forms for details event info
Interactive map to filter both of the above by location (I'm assuming this will need to be flash, but I'd rather find another solution if possible)
I know there are other solutions out there that may be more suited to this than WordPress (Drupal, custom build, etc) but if it's at all possible to tackle this as a one man show then I'm going to charge it head-on!
Stack Overflowers and fellow WordPress fans...your insight would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time.
This graph grants your experience with your weapon of choice, but the results are still clear. You can still tackle this as a 1 man show, it will just take a bit of a learning curve to conquer the fundamentals of a CMS more suited to the task at hand. I'm sure plenty of WordPress affecionados will come along and strangle my reputation, but I've worked with both and have found that in terms of flexibility, WordPress is not king, and for the custom coding you are going to have to do (hope you have some PHP?), I feel that you will find it easier to integrate with another platform. This task will be difficult if not impossible to accomplish without writing code, even if there is a set of plugins that appear on the face to match your needs perfectly.
But anyway, since you probably don't really care that much about my opinion, for WordPress, your plugin options look like..
Calendar - Events Calendar
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-calendar/
The screenshots don't look terribly promising though.
Most plugins I have found are geared toward being administered from the admin panel, it may be difficult to provide a user interface to such plugins, and it does not look like the event calendar is an exception. An experienced developer should be able to hook into the event publishing code with relative ease, but it could be a frustrating experience for the inexperienced.
For interactive maps, the Google Maps API is very feature rich, and you should be able to adapt it to your suit your mapping needs, regardless of platform.
If you want all of your providers to have their own blog, etc, what was once the WordPress MU plugin, but is now core-bundled WordPress MS (multisite) is what you need.
This again may also prove rigid, and you may encounter difficulty trying to bend the iron of WordPress enabling all your multisite users to be able to post to a common community site. I've only built 2 platforms with MU, so I'm not positive about this.
To unapologetically reiterate my first point, what would be light custom code may turn impossibly frustrating using WordPress.
I like WordPress, and choose it often for my clients. I have never extended it to suit a larger project.
If you do decide to use it, I look forward to hopefully helping you with any questions you may have along the way, feel free to ask.
I'm planning to build a website that has the following in the first Phase
Events List
Events Management by admin
Register for events (buy tickets)
News List
Manage News
Support Multi-Language
In the next phase i would like the site to be a social networking site (considering elgg)
I want the website to be light and fast. I've tried Joomla/Drupal. They seem to be slow.
Any recommendations for a framework/CMS?
I've been using Textpattern for a CMS based website I am developing, and so far it seems like it can handle all of the CMS work I push at it while staying out of the way as far as code. It has a bit of a learning curve like most CMS programs, but is pretty easy to pick up. You'll still have to build out the functionality for events (look into the plugin ZemEvents), as Textpattern starts out with just the base install and you add on to it as needed. You may need to handle E-commerce differently though, not sure if there are any plugins for Textpattern that could handle that.
I, personally second LocalPCGuy’s recommendation since Textpattern is, in my eyes, the most underestimated CMS in the market. I especially love it for its simple XML-like templating tags.
Talking about easy templating you might also want to check out the Python based Django framework. This is, by far, the fastest framework/cms I ever came across.
I help out at a local soup kitchen, and they are wanting to create a website. Most of their criteria are pretty simple, they want to be able to have a calendar, post pictures, and have a blog. However they also want to be able to manage volunteer's. They want to be able to post a event, have a list of jobs that they need volunteer's for that event, and allow people to sign up for the jobs. I would like to base this website on a well known platform like DotNetNuke, WordPress, or Drupal. Before I go and code my own plugin for managing volunteers I decided to see if I could find a platform that already has a module available. So far I have not been able to find anything. Has anybody heard of one or used one in the past? I would appreciate any suggestions.
There's a whole range of ways to do this, but I haven't ever seen a dedicated solution (plugin or otherwise).
On the one hand, a blog could do all that you're asking. Posting pictures and blog entries? That's wordpress all over. Want a calendar? We have a plugin for that. Want to let volunteers sign up for stuff? Let them post comments.
On the other hand, the problem you're describing isn't unique: In my own experience I've wanted the software you describe. May I suggest that, if you have the time, you make something totally awesome for the volunteer community?
Our company, Wired Impact, recently released a plugin called Wired Impact Volunteer Management that provides exactly the functionality you're looking for. You can learn more and download the plugin at https://wordpress.org/plugins/wired-impact-volunteer-management/.
I'd like to start using a CMS. I've been building static XHTML/CSS pages for awhile, but want to get with the times.
I'm PHP illiterate as of yet, so ease of templating and availability of (free) modules are important factors.
From what I've been reading, SilverStripe or MODx sound like good candidates. What do you think?
Take 1 WordPress a day for 7 days.
Wordpress is a great choice(if not the best) if you want a blog.
For anything else i would suggest Joomla. Its one of the most widely used content management systems out there so there is tons of documentation and people who will gladly assist you. Its open source, which means its free. Easy to use, customise and extend. There are thousands of extensions(plugins) for it.
Templates (the sites skin(design)) are extremly easy to build, almost no skills in php are nessesary.
Take a peak at it at http://joomla.org
There is a great wiki with everything you need to get started at http://docs.joomla.org/