Integrating a Forum with Blog or CMS

[rogerd]

A while back, there was a brief discussion of the possibility of blog software automatically creating a forum topic for discussion.

I'm curious about what people are doing, if anything, to integrate forums and either blogs or CMSs. Most of the sites I've visited simply graft on a forum, with only casual linkage between the two areas.

Blog/CMS software usually allow visitor comments, but typically don't offer interaction and management as rich as what a forum provides; bypassing the comment approach and letting the discussion flow in a forum makes a lot of sense. In addition, forum readers may visit the content, while content readers will get introduced to the forum.

Anyone doing something cool along these lines, or thinking about it?

[linear]

Using Wordpress for articles/CMS and SMF for forums, I modified the built-in SSI features of the forum software to do just about exactly what you describe. The high level outline is that I post an article, then open a board thread in a forum that's dedicated to that purpose (article discussion). While this itself isn't super-slick, I then use a custom post field to hold the URL of the forum thread. I have the choice of a simple link ("discuss this article", which leads to the forum thread) or a completely embedded forum thread using the modified SSI feature. I wanted this to thwart the onslaught of comment spam, and to put some accountability behind comments.

What's nice for me is that my cookie scheme allows me to recognize registered forum users on the article sites which are subdomains (basically I set the cookie at example.com while the sites are widgets.example.com, wodgets.example.com, etc.). So no additional logins or nagging result from this scheme. Since all the subdomains can access the domain cookie, you pass from forum to subdomain and back pretty seamlessly, I can track your clicktrail all the way, and I customize pages based on your forum ID and group membership. A lot can be done with that technique, but I just adjust the frequency of ad display so that repeat visitors don't drag down my CTR. They have a 1 in 7 probability of catching an ad on any given page load, guests/uncookied users get an ad every time. My who's online forum page shows people (users or guests) in my sites as well because of this integration (it took a little extra customization though).

Having used a blog tool as a CMS since roughly 2001, I'm pretty firmly convinced that anonymous user-supplied text on-page is not going to do anything positive for my adsense targeting. So at this point, I stick with the "discuss this" links and let the board do what it does best. I do make sure my posts on the board are peppered with links back into leaf pages on my sites too.

SMF makes it pretty simple for anyone who's fairly PHP-literate to use substantial chunks of forum functionality in a PHP-driven site.

[rogerd]

That's exactly what I had in mind, linear, although it would be fairly cool if the linkage and thread creation could be automated.

Do you make the lead post in the forum entry the blog post, or just link back to it for those who want to read it?

[linear]

What I thought would be cool would be to embed the forum thread in the blog post. In order to keep continuity I made the first post in the thread a link to the article, and embedded the thread starting at post number two. The resulting look/feel is a lot like traditional blog comments, but the forum software does all the things it's good at, like bbcode and scrubbing for tags for example.

It is pretty cool, but like I said, allowing users (even authenticated ones) to alter the page content didn't do me any favors when it came to adsense targeting. So now I just offer a forum thread link on the article pages. I may try it again with an iframe approach to help insulate me from those effects. Right now it's fairly far down the priority list for me.

[rogerd]

Hmmm, if you could get an RSS feed for an individual thread, it would be easily to plug it into the blog page.

[linear]

That's a reasonable approach, and I played with CaRP to do that. Since SMF offers that level of modularity, going to XML just to go back again seemed like unnecessary overhead. It would be a useful technique if you had forum and blog on different platforms, or used a hosted blog.

Users will post big images and break your layout unless you restrict the image sizes. Scrubbing the images out entirely wasn't an option for me. I don't think I could set different image size restrictions per board using my forum software, but if you could that would be a handy feature for this setup.