Online Community Platforms
Filed Under online community · Tagged: expression engine, kickapps, ning, online community
When I first started building online communitiies, there wasn’t much choice. For me, the choice came down to phpBB and vBulletin, though there were a few others. They were, and still are, fairly basic message board software. And, I do have to say that neither of them has evolved much over the years since I launched my first online community (in 2002).
I do try to keep up with what new platforms are becoming popular, what’s on the horizon and such. And, for a practical reason as well. I’ve mentioned that the platform I use has not evolved with the times, and over the past year I’ve gone from having a portfolio of over a dozen communities on the vBulletin platform now to just three or four. Three if you count only the ones that have actual communities on them.
Look at all the options available now. I’ve been looking at Ning, Community Server, Expression Engine, and many others. I just found one called KickApps today. I got a start at a new community site with Expression Engine, but then heard about the upcoming new version of EE and decided that I should just wait and get the ball rolling when that is out instead of doing it once and doing it again when the new version comes.
But that presents me with a problem. After so many years of developing online communities using vBulletin as a platform, my eyes are open to the new possibilities yet there are so many good choices that I’m having trouble settling into one. I’m comfortable developing with vBulletin, and that provides some drag with making the decision.
What has really been helpful in the past is seeing what others have done before. What have you built with an online community platform? When I visit one of the software company websites I usually click around to see if they have a portfolio where they list client sites. Some do, some don’t, some have just a few listed. A lot of them just list corporate sites and those don’t fascinate me so much as the ones that individual developers build. You know, if Coke or Nike is developing an online community there’s millions going into it and the way I see it is that it just has to look good, and if it doesn’t there’s a serious problem there. But, if the platform can allow for smaller companies or individual developers to build something great, then that’s the kind of platform that gets me excited.
Peter Davis is a web developer, investor, author, entrepreneur, and most importantly a father. 
I don’t think you should hold out for the latest version of EE - get going with the current stable release. The new version has already been delayed, and when it is launched it will no doubt take a couple of months for the bugs to be ironed out.
The current version of EE will do everything you ask of it - my latest online community is running from the existing EE build. I faced the same dilemma as you, but decided not to wait for the latest release to come out.
I am glad I made that decision. At the end of the day, waiting for the latest version to launch is a bit like waiting for the next upgrade of a PC or Mac to hit the market. If you start waiting for the next upgrade, you will always be waiting!
- Martin
Hi Martin, thanks for the feedback. My problem is more that it takes me an extraordinary amount of time to ramp up with a platform, not so much that the features aren’t there. Specifically I mean the templating, which I have heard will be completely different in the new version. I’d feel better about investing the time to ramp up if I didn’t think I’d be throwing more time at it again in a couple months.
Nicely done site you have listed there by the way. Did you do all the work on it yourself?
Peter,
Thanks for the follow on twitter! I love what you are writing about here. I am especially interested in analytic tools that determine a website or blog’s traffic. It is very problematic.
So many SEO or Social Media consultants claim to have traffic and there is no way to verify. The Alexa rankings and Quantcast information can be misleading. Are there any other tools to analyze and investigate these speaker’s claims?
Thanks so much!
dean
Hi Dean, thanks for the comment. Measuring traffic is a whole other animal. It’s often impossible to ‘prove’ to someone the validity of your traffic without giving away the keys, so to speak. In other words, if someone shows you where and how the traffic comes, what stops you from going out and doing it yourself. Having said that, some tools like Alexa can give rough estimates of traffic that are sometimes useful. But, like you, I have not found any solution that I find totally satisfactory. For my own in-house purposes I use Google Analytics.
External IM is the wave of the future, think Mobile IM, text, community, GPS + Gtalk + Twitter + Digg, etc..
Thanks for the comment paisley. I do wonder how far things like Twitter are going to go. I work with a lot of older people in my communities, for example, and a lot of them have enough trouble figuring out how to use a basic bulletin board. I think there will be a lot more trouble getting widespread acceptance to things like Twitter and Mobile IM. The first wave of adopters who are on Twitter now are just as likely to be moved onto something else by the time it’s getting ready to go mainstream.
Ning wll drive you nuts. EE doesn’t remove the need for vBulletin on large sites, I have one that runs both.
Paisley: why would we build a site that is going to use only external services - that would be impossible to monetize. Also, I find divorcing commenting from the content, ala a disqus type solution, provides and disjointed discussion.
Dean: if traffic numbers come from Alexa, run, don’t walk. At the very least, traffic numbers should come from Google Analytics.
PEter: I see Twitter as a possible shout box client, using perhaps a hashtag. As the categorization improves (tweetdeck is coming a long way) we can start to funnel the content into silos. Since we can find ways to funnel it, we can also funnel it into rss which means we can use it on a site. But I see the two as fundamentally different. Forums with long form threaded discussions bring an entirely different value,
Mark, I’d love to have a look at your site that’s running on EE & vB. Thanks for the comments.
I’m not an administrator of any social-network (that I know of … lol), but there has been a string of Social-Nets offering ’splitting of ad-revenue’ of late (Yuwie.com, MyGizmoz.com, MyVieWin.com, BlackPlanet.com, myLot.com, etc.) You might check out some of those, see if their admin have any advice.
Thanks, I’ll check those out.
Have you given things like Dolphin (http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/) a try? Those Boonex folks have a huge community growing.
Thanks for the follow on Twitter, by the way.
No, I’ve never heard of that one before. It certainly looks promising, but honestly I’ve never seen a site using that platform before.