Building Communities through the Web
Recently, I have aquired some work that involves the community a lot, where input from them will be requireded. While Blogs do have the functionality to leave comments on posts, its more for news etc. I have been looking into Community Forums to fill this need. Community Forums have a wide range of uses ranging from general discussions about that latest topic to techincal help where you search or ask for the answer to your question.
There are a range of different packages out there, some cost some don’t. After a little searching I came across phpBB, while it is a free download you will have to have to right hosting features to run it, mainly php and a mySQL database.
In short this software is very easy to use, it will install itself (based on inputting the correct mySQL details) once installed you will have a large range of admin functions ranging from Managing Users, Forums, Posts and so on. User are able to browse through the board and if registered and logged in can post replys are start new topics.
Registering is a simple task, all that is asked of is a user name, valid email and password (which the administrator can control the size of), then the user will be sent an email to request authoristion, once authorised the user will then be able to have full access to the board to interact with the users, be it simply creating topics and posting replys, or to send instant messages to individuals as well as add friends, upload their own avatar (image that represents them).
phpBB has a lot of functions included in the new version, and even though it is in beta stage I haven’t encountered any problems with it.
