How to manage content....

[Slavik]

Right, the demands of the new forum are already kicking in! So im looking at my options. Now while the 8wayrun stuff looks good, and with the modules, if it stays up to date, it looks like a great system.

However after the farse of updating vbulletin with massive mods from one version to the other, I am thinking if I stick to wordpress then all I have to worry about XF wise is getting the bridge up to date.

Now heres the dilema, I would like a "content page" I am undecided as of yet if I want the forums to be the index, or the content page. But as things expand, we will be adding a wiki in (again 8wayrun system looks good) but again its more reliance on forum addons.

Im kind of torn. The next up and coming competition on my forum will involve members entering photos for voting. So some system there will need to go in!

What would you do?

WWYD!

 

[Jethro]

The easy solution would be WP and additional mods for that product.

Am currently facing the same issue with a site on another forum product. When we upgrade we are going to lose both of our major mods, one due to me being way too lazy to rewrite, and the other due to the developer abandoning the product all together due to family commitments. Figure we can kind of get what we need with WP, though the forum product doesn't have the same integration that Xen has with XP.

Have a hunt around the WP addons, you can do it via the WP ACP btw, and see if anything fits your additional requirements.

 

[CTXMedia]

Is there a reason why you can't use the xF node tree to create the page/s? or doesn't it offer the flexibility you need?

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Slavik]

Is there a reason why you can't use the xF node tree to create the page/s? or doesn't it offer the flexibility you need?

Cheers,
Shaun

unfortunately not

 

[Fred Sherman]

I don't think there is one right answer. So much of it depends on the type of community you have, how active it is and what kind of activity you experience. Content is definitely king. Where does your best original content come from?

If your best content originates within your forum, then that is what you need to promote. WP isn't going to help with that. If your best content is from authored articles, WP is ideal for that, but it doesn't foster discussion in your forums.

What is your goal for your site? Are you looking to grow your community into a large one? To what end? Are you looking for a large number of visitors to leverage your site monitization? Or are you looking to build an smaller, but more active and dedicated community?

Some smart person could build a consultancy just out of community building alone. Certainly someone smarter than me. I can articulate some of the questions, but I sure as heck don't have all the answers.

 

[AdamD]

Hard to decide on which poll option to choose, to be honest.

I still believe one shouldn't try and reinvent the wheel (Like VB4's "Cms") and instead, focus on bridging with products that have passed the test of time, so to speak, like wordpress.

 

[AdamD]

And on that note, I chose Wordpress plugin, heh

 

[Jaxel]

Naturally, I chose my own 8WayRun.Com modifiations... they are made for my website and my needs in mind.

Honestly I find that so much out there is just OVERKILL. Wordpress does one thing, and they need to keep adding features just to stay relevant; they end up being bloated, confusing and just a complete waste of resources. In the software industry, this is what they call the "Feature Creep". Honestly when I see websites out there, all they really want is a 'portal', and the occasional 'page'. With the portal, I've taken care of that... with the occasional page, XenForo's built in system is more than enough.

If I needed more in-depth content management, I would use a wiki. Unfortunately I think both MediaWiki and VaultWiki are overkill... and I've used them both on 8WR. I wrote my own wiki for 8WR because neither of the aforementioned systems fit my needs. MediaWiki was bloated, slow and confusing for my users to use, as well as skin. VaultWiki was nicer, but in the end, it was even slower than MediaWiki when it came to templates. And it blows my mind how NEITHER of these two systems cached built pages.

So I wrote my own.