Building a business community - tools to use - Community Building and User Generated Content forum at WebmasterWorld

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Building a business community - tools to use

dannyboy83

7:57 am on Oct 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hi all,

I've been doing a lot of research into setting up an online community for a software company in the UK. The community will be used by their customers (from all over the world), resellers and staff.

My plan is to have a blog with various categorised nwes stories. I'd also like a forum, so that users can create their own topics.

I like Wordpress as a blog and Vbulletin appears to be the best forum software. I've looked at using both with a bridge, using CMS systems such as Drupal, Joomla and Expression Engine, and thought about running WP and VB seperately.

If I had a blog and a forum, perhaps I could make the blog commenting free for all (using captcha to help against spam) and only requiring users to register for the forum.

Perhaps a CMS would make all that easier, with one single login.

Anyway, enough of my babbling - anyone got any opinions or similar experience?

rogerd

2:23 pm on Oct 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

I like vBulletin as a forum, but there are plenty of fans of other systems here. A couple of thoughts: vBulletin now has a user blog feature, if that's of interest.

If the blogging will be done by a small number of experts, then a useful vBB feature would be auto-starting a thread in an appropriate forum every time there's a new blog post (it checks the feed).

King_Fisher

6:31 pm on Oct 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Running a blog and a forum is a lot of work. I think a good blog, properly set up, can serve both functions with half the work...KF

Frida

1:40 pm on Oct 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

WP + phpBB is a good kick start I guess

rogerd

5:47 am on Oct 12, 2007 (gmt 0)

K_F is right about a forum being work if you want to make it successful. A blog with little commenting can be a great blog (even if it's not a great community). A forum with no posting is just a dead forum, and a huge turnoff to visitors.

dannyboy83

10:29 am on Oct 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thanks very much for the replies.

I've looked at a lot of different systems and have been tempted by a few.

I think to start I will use Wordpress for a blog to start and will look into the feasibility of adding a vBulletin forum at a later date. I'm hoping to use Wordpress as a basic CMS and edit the code to have vBulletin sitting under the Wordpress header.

But that's for another day!

Cheers again.