On Blogging Australia

I’ve just spent most of the weekend looking at open source content management systems (CMS) for a work project - and have been playing with Drupal. Drupal has modules that cover:

• collaborative document design,
• static content (such as information pages and FAQs),
• blogs, and
• forums.

The forum idea got me thinking - a couple of weeks back I grabbed the thebloglink.com domain name and have been thinking about how to use it - and yes, it could serve as a forum about blogging. I thought about Drupal’s forum software and played with some alternatives.

In the past I’ve used specialist forum software like Invision Power Board (now IP.Board) and phpBB - but found them a little heavy-weight for the benefit they provided - so I wanted to look at alternatives.

I started at the WikiPedia article and while it was good at explaining some of the technical terms, it didn’t actually compare any specific forum software packages. That said, it did refer me to the forum packages written in PHP article which looked fairly comprehensive. I ran through the options, looking for what I was after - preferably something lightweight or with enough features to make the heavy/slow stuff worthwhile.

phpBB is better than it was (and I’m trialling it on another domain to see how it goes - more about that experiment when it’s fully set up). That said, Drupal’s combination of static pages, discussion forums and simple blogs won me over - if you would like to have a look, feel free to visit The Blog Link - it is not very exciting yet.

To be fully useful, I really need to ask the question: does Australia need another blogging forum? We’ve already got the BUMPzee Australian Blogs Community, blogs.com.au, and Bloggerati - not to mention Blogging Cafe - so the market is getting a little full. The thing is that I needed to do the work anyhow, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal. What do you think?