Bridging forums, blogs, and content areas
From an email
Thank you in advance for responding to this question.
I am getting involved in a project that has blogging and news component but also member ship area and forumz. I am not sure that wordpress is enough. For blogging it seems fine, for a social networking maybe not.
I am looking for the best starter set of produts or plugin combinations that I should look further into.
I agree that Wordpress is probably not going to totally fulfill what you’re after. It’s a great package and I’ve used Wordpress successfully on several projects, but I think that some people start with Wordpress and hack it to a point where they might as well have started from scratch. That said, there is a forum software called bbPress that’s written by the same group as Wordpress and looks pretty good. The Wordpress support forums use bbPress if you want to see how it looks. I’ve actually looked through the bbPress quite a bit because my long term goals for this site call for the addition of a forum and it looks like bbPress would fit in pretty well here.
It’s likely that no product, especially free ones, will fit exactly what you’re after. The route to take really depends on how well you’re able to customize open source products and if you’re not able to customize one to your needs how much you’re willing to spend to have it done.
If you’re looking to simply have it where users can register in either the forum or blog and have their accounts shared you’re looking for something called a “bridge”. Odds are very good that you’ll be able to find a bridge between almost any popular blog software and almost any popular forum software. There is a Wordpress to SMF bridge plugin available which are the two packages I would use since Wordpress and SMF are the blog and forum software respectively that I have administrative experience with. Note: I don’t know anything about the bridge that I linked to other than it was the first one that came up in a Google search for wordpress smf bridge.
Although if I was looking to start a project that was forum based with blogs I would probably go the other way and find a forum package I liked and work on adding blog support to it. SMF has a blog modification available and I’ve seen IPB forums with blogs in them. As popular as vBulletin is I would imagine there’s some type of blog modification available there as well.
The advantage of starting with a forum and adding in blogs would be that your visitors could post and respond in the forums, and those that really had something to say could use their blog. The downside is that the blog plugins likely lack the really “bloggy” type features like trackbacks.
One other idea to look at is a portal that’s tied to a forum backend. I’ve looked at TinyPortal for a site of mine, but never got around to installing it. The idea is a good one though. It takes your forum and wraps it up to act as a content site. The first portal site that comes to mind is Texas Photo Forum. Their forum is using vBulletin and you can see there what a portal can do.
Hopefully this gives you a place to start. I wish I could be a little more help, but I’ve never done a project that linked member bases together like it sounds like you’re trying to do.
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