Page 2 of 2

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:04 am
by Dave_L
......and I think the cost of a VBulletin licence would put Tony off anyway!

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 6:29 am
by Stuarty
You can get IP board and IP content for less than a vBulletin licence, they run the same core so are completely seamless from forum to site content.

I personally wouldnt write off a CMS approach; especially if the forum and CMS were hand in hand. Purely from a ease of use and efficiency point of view. Ie, link goes here, text goes there, image goes somewhere in about it *click* job done. No more cracking out notepad++ or ftp progs. Also allows for more methodical approaches, like cross-content etc e.g. things like british standards are referred to over multiple pages, so that means you need to find them and change them, save them and upload.

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 7:13 am
by Carberry
Stuarty wrote:You can get IP board and IP content for less than a vBulletin licence, they run the same core so are completely seamless from forum to site content.

I personally wouldnt write off a CMS approach; especially if the forum and CMS were hand in hand. Purely from a ease of use and efficiency point of view. Ie, link goes here, text goes there, image goes somewhere in about it *click* job done. No more cracking out notepad++ or ftp progs. Also allows for more methodical approaches, like cross-content etc e.g. things like british standards are referred to over multiple pages, so that means you need to find them and change them, save them and upload.

That was my point about CMS, very easy to update and Joomla / Drupal have been used successfully on bigger sites (content wise and traffic wise). Would make life a lot easier transferring all the content on this site over to a new one using CMS, could more or less copy and paste and can easily assign permission to a moderator or three to modify pages.

For forums, phpBB is free, open source, easy to setup.

Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2014 11:12 am
by Tony McC
We have a beta-version Brew Cabin in phpBB, but I need time I just don't have to get it implemented. I can either earn a precarious living while keeping things limping alonsg as they are or I can starve while getting the finishing touches put together to make the Nu Brew fit for use. I've created a monster - so much of what I do with the site at the moment is non-earning, but if I stop doing it, the site loses relevance. News stories, reviews, fresh content, updates, even these rants in the Brew Cabin earn nowt yet they take up time that could (maybe *should*) be spent earning a living.

However, I never set up the site to make money. It's here because it's my passion, but with each giant leap forward in technology, it becomes an ever more expensive passion.

If I were starting pavingexpert today, I probably would opt for a CMS such as Joomla - it works well for the bike club site which we set up as new, but for a legacy site such as this, with 17 year's worth of content, the sheer amount of work in re-coding all those pages, the images, the text, the layouts and all thge other bits and pieces that make up the site, is a mammoth task. The only way I could see to make it even vaguely possible was to sub it out to one of the South Asian sweat-shop coders, which rails against my personal ethics, but what choice do I have?

A mate who runs a medium-sized manufacturing business reckons you can get students to take on this sort of task as part of the compulsory work experience they need to complete to qualify for their degree or PhD but I'm not sure what value there could be for some poor student to re-code all my witterings.