I’ve been charged with setting up an online community forum for a diverse range of people on my local community. Many of these are no greatly computer literate, some are.
I’ve been exploring several options to try to achieve what I have visualised and discussed with the client.
I have tried various set ups using options such as Oxwall, Boonex, Wordpress and phpBB. Much as they all have their strengths and weaknesses none of them are managing to achieve quite what I had been hoping for which is an interface which is more visual and able to accomadate more graphics at least within the headings of the forums.
Also the support is pretty weak on Oxwall and Boonex which means I can get things so far down the line and then am left hanging by a lack of support.
I’m just wondering if there is anyone here who may know of any other community forum packages which are a bit more visually interesting and flexible in their visual/graphical setup?
The graphical elements are important to make the forums a bit more engaging for a client group who may find an over wordy interface off putting.
I know that by the nature of the structure of most forum software that things are organised in a lateral nested manner which is fine but if this look can be embellished by more graphics in headings etc then that would be great.
I’m interested to know if anyone has any other suggestions for such a project.
Hope this makes sense to anyone reading it!
Have you looked at Vanilla yet? That’s a very lovely forum, and you can do quite a lot to style it. There is a format of it that is just a single line of JavaScript to include in your otherwise entirely Freeway carrier page, and it’s very easy to do.
There is a free open-source version of Vanilla, which you install on your server. There is also a for-pay hosted version of it, which they manage for you and you simply embed in your page.
Walter
On Jun 2, 2012, at 5:37 PM, tonzodehoo wrote:
I’ve been charged with setting up an online community forum for a diverse range of people on my local community. Many of these are no greatly computer literate, some are.
I’ve been exploring several options to try to achieve what I have visualised and discussed with the client.
I have tried various set ups using options such as Oxwall, Boonex, Wordpress and phpBB. Much as they all have their strengths and weaknesses none of them are managing to achieve quite what I had been hoping for which is an interface which is more visual and able to accomadate more graphics at least within the headings of the forums.
Also the support is pretty weak on Oxwall and Boonex which means I can get things so far down the line and then am left hanging by a lack of support.
I’m just wondering if there is anyone here who may know of any other community forum packages which are a bit more visually interesting and flexible in their visual/graphical setup?
The graphical elements are important to make the forums a bit more engaging for a client group who may find an over wordy interface off putting.
I know that by the nature of the structure of most forum software that things are organised in a lateral nested manner which is fine but if this look can be embellished by more graphics in headings etc then that would be great.
I’m interested to know if anyone has any other suggestions for such a project.
Hope this makes sense to anyone reading it!
Hullo Walter, I’ve had a look at Vanilla also and they are certainly quite attractive though I’d have to say that I have found that most of the things that can be achieved in the paid versions are achievable using PhpBB.
I’m looking to try to have a home page on the forum which is a bit more than just the usual stacked horizontal text blocks. I’d prefer the home page at least to be more modular in that it can have blocks with most recent or popular topics as headline blocks which link into the usual forum structure.
Also to allow graphics within the forum headers or topics.
I haven’t come across any which fit the bill yet.
So far the best I’ve managed is here: http://www.thegorbals.co.uk/ideasforchange.html
Its taken a bit ot get here but the support to get those last few bits of graphics into place is really taking ages, which is why I’m re-exploring the options out there.
I know that the customisation of such template based packages can be a bit a challenge when your not very strong on the whole programming structure used to put it together.