[IxDA Discuss] Community Engine for Own Web Site?

[Jack Skates]

I would check out http://www.drupal.org or http://www.joomla.org for a
community engine with discussion based functionality. They are both open
source and there are tons of add on modules that have been developed by
other people.

I have a very traditional online forum application I'm using (see
http://www.northbaysportriders.com ) and it's running on Invision Power
Board (see http://www.invisionpower.com ) which is pretty much the
traditional board you're describing, but it also has a lot of features. I
also created this site using it... http://www.uexcentral.com/forums/ (which
was really more of a proof of concept then anything else).

I think what's missing from all these products is the ability for people to
link to each other and the ability to create groups. I'm guessing with all
the interest in those features to promote "social networking" that all of
these products will be adding that in their next big release cycles. It's
actually not a very difficult technical problem so they just need to figure
out the integration points with their current apps.

Hope that helps.

Jack Skates


On 12/1/06 8:39 AM, "Andrei Sedelnikov" <usabilist at gmail.com> wrote:

> The internet forums / bulletin boards are dying. They actually were a
> form of a limited community only having a discussion feature. Now the
> "real" communities are coming everywhere with relations, blogs, maps
> etc. Well one can easily create own community on the sites like Ning.
> 
> But: what if I want to have the same thing, but on MyOwnDomain.com ?
> In other words - are there "community engines" available? Googling on
> this topic is difficult - these words are appearing in many contexts.