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| DownUnder | June 2005 |
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Setting Up An Online Community, Fast by Ian McPherson
Back in February, I wrote an article on Peak Oil for Margo Kingston's Webdiary on the Sydney Morning Herald's website in Australia. There were over 140 comments on the piece, and as a result of the comments I was invited to attend a Meetup of a small group of people with a similar interest in the subject. Well, one thing led to another, and we decided to produce a website where people could visit, register, find information, communicate with other members and carry out other community activities. We registered sydneypeakoil.com and bought some space on a Linux server at OnSmart. Part of the package from OnSmart includes the free phpBB software, which we used for the project. Well, what a great piece of open source software this is! It is easy to administer, operates quickly, and is fairly easy to customise. Additionally, there are a wide range of "styles" available, offering completely new "looks" for your Bulletin Board. Check out the free alternatives available from the phpBB community, here, here, here and here.  In the end, I only had to produce an HTML Home Page, which linked directly to the Bulletin Board, and I would be surprised if there are more than another three or four HTML pages on the whole site. Information is housed in various download folders on the server and linked to from the Board, and any other outside information is simply linked to from user posts on the Board. The "user" experience is particularly good. Posts can be keyed straight in to the field provided, or copied and pasted from your favourite word processor or text editor. The "Preview" function is an absolute ripper, as I hate reading copy in form fields! Previewing the post allows you to read it over carefully, check links, and edit line breaks and paragraphs as you wish.  Additional tools exist for HTML formatting (the developers call it BBCode), including bolds, italics, quotes from other posts, code, lists, images and URLs. You can also add a range of smilies, for a bit of fun. Now this is not a software review of phpBB. Sean Michael Kerner at builder.com has done a better job of that than me. This is just a quick look and a heads up! If you want to get a community Bulletin Board up and running quickly, with a minimum of work and fuss, and you don't need every bell and whistle under the sun, phpBB is for you! Highly recommended, and better than that, free :) Check out the phpBB website for more information: |
See you all in the next issue! Ian McPherson |
