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By keith.stoddart on
How do you set up a forum site that is not too dissimilar to ecademy?. My idea for a site is not like ecademy but it does use similar functionality.
It is going to be used for my collegues all over the place to access the site from anywhere (like a membership) and post comments, updates and emails out latest contributions etc.
My knowledge of web programming is nil. I do build sites which are more 'brochure' sites with limited functionality (a contact form).
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards
Keith
Comments
forum-centric site?
If you're site is going to rely heavily on forums, you might want to consider an alternative to drupal as its forums are currently fairly primitive. Drupal's strength is in its modularity and configureability. it's pretty easy to make a site that is totally unique and has support for a vast number of community oriented features (blogging, forums, moderation, very flexible permissions... on and on). but in some specific areas, such as forums, image upload/management, multimedia support, it's not as fancy as some of the other CMSs around, but then those solutions have their weaknesses too.
best bet for you if you have no ability to customize code is to try out various solutions, preferably by installing them and configuring them. it's a bit of work, but you'll pretty quickly find a favorite and your choice will be come obvious (hopefully). the CMSs that made it to my final list were drupal, mambo, sitellite and tikiwiki. but my needs are a lot different from yours.
check out these sites for lists of CMSs:
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
this site has a lot of CVS demos running live that you can try out:
http://opensourcecms.com/
good luck!
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ecadamy seems to be doing
ecadamy seems to be doing fine with Drupal forums.
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Forums
in Drupal vanilla flavour lack the ability to moderate like in traditional forum systems.
You can't move posts.
You can't close threads.
There is no "sticky" etc.
You also lack many of the forum-related search functions. (author, date, sorting ..)
Inflexibilty in threading-layout.
Hard limit on blocking of editing after a reply. (seems subjective/political)
There are no settings for these; but of course anyone can edit the sourcecode, as long as they are programmers.
;-)
The orginal poster did not
The orginal poster did not indicate his need for this. If you want this then please submit patches or help develop this feature as an add on module to have this occur. We have these folks who want stuff, but no one who wants it will step up and work on it. I do not use forums so could care less, but have a deep suspicion that if the effort to 'authenticate' to different forums was spent on enhancing the forums module, then we would be miles ahead already.
ecamdemy is working fine with the older built in. DrupalEd.org is also a good resource for Education related ideas. Education sites are more than just forums and I suspect Drupal will fufill his needs nicely and be able to grow and expand over time as he may need.
-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Thank you Hislaughter
Great comments. I will take them on board. I have looked at the other sites you mentioned but I am still very much in the dark.
I suppose what I was hoping to do was get some step by step instructions on how to set up a database then how to implement the forum template into Dreamweaver (I use Dreamweaver MX for the Mac), adjust it using my own graphics and then hey presto!
It obviously is a lot more complicated than that. I did purchase a couple of books yesterday. One 'PHP & MySQL Everyday Apps for Dummies' and 'PHP, MySQL and Apache' an ALLinone book by Julie C.Meloni. As both are inches thick and as I am not the most tolerant of readers I don't think I am going to learn much from them!!
Again, thank you for your reply and I will certainly keep trying and learning. That is in fact how I became a Mac expert (I use the term loosely of course!) just by going through it and learning as I went.
Of course anything else you want to say or anyone you want to pass me on to would very much appreciated.
Take care and kind regards
Keith