What's under the hood of your online community?

[docubio]

What's under the hood--is that a hemi?

I'm a new webmaster, but I've been a techie for a while. It's great to see how tools for online communities have matured over the years to the point where one can select a few major pieces off the shelf and hook them together to make a complete community package. I'd like to get together a good sample together of how people are hooking those tools up. What are your tools of choice for running an online community? SMF/Mambo/Coppermine? phpBB/Mambo? straight phpBB?

Thanks in advance!

[rogerd]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, docubio.

Lots of webmasters use just a forum for their online community - phpBB and vBulletin both offer some hacks to extend their range a bit, like the portal & CMS hacks.

What sort of additional beyond-forum functionality are you trying to achieve?

[docubio]

Thanks for the reply rogerd.

I'm not sure of all the additional functionality just yet. I suppose that I want options for growth more than anything. Essentially I'm building a community for people working with many mediums (photos, text, audio, and video). This alone isn't too hard to facilitate, but over time I hope/expect to make this a full featured community including ecommerce, auctions, chat, member matchups, galleries, regular columns like a magazine, calendars, collaborative tools, etc. etc. etc.--it's hard to say just yet as I hope to have some good ideas along the way to help people to work together and get the most out of a community.

Any advice on where to start so that I have lots of room for growth? I'm leaning toward SMF, but it never seems to be mentioned in this forum for some reason and that has me worried. I'm going to start a couple of other threads as these questions seem to stray from the original survey intent of this post.

Thanks!

[linear]

I am using SMF, and taking full advantage of their SSI features to integrate to my several installations of WordPress, which I use more like a CMS than a blog (comments/trackbacks/pingbacks are off). If you're a registered user on my forums, any page of any of my WPs will greet you, and I do a few other minor things like that. I'm workingon using SMF threads to implement registered-user-only comments on articles, and I had to modify/extend ssi.php to do that.

I'm planning on aggregating all the RSS feeds generated by my forums and WP installs into a custom portal page using CaRP. My ultimate goal is to have a user-customizable portal, where they select the feeds they want, much like my yahoo (but within my niche--feeds from me and my partner sites).

I'm just getting started, but I have all that plumbing built except for the user-customized portal bit. SMF's RSS and SSI support was the deciding factor for me. IF you haven't looked at ssi_examples.php yet (on any install of SMF), check it out.

[FourDegreez]

Rolled my own. Postgres for the database, Jetty servlet engine, Quartz for scheduled tasks, JDOM for XML, and Xalan+XSLTC for XSL transformations.

[wheel]

I'm using a phpnuke/postnuke type of program to run the main page and add news announcements. originally had phpBB for the forum, not integrated at all. Got too large, moved to vbulletin again unintegrated. Seems to work fine for me. We're going to hit a million posts in the next few months.