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Three Things I’ve Learned Building A Forum

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This past week, I’ve been working my tail off on the WordPress Tavern forum. What an experience it’s been in just seven days. When I first decided that I wanted to attach a forum to the WPTavern website, I was inundated with suggestions from users on which forum software I should use. Everything from PHPBB3, to SimplePress to SMF was thrown my way. In the beginning, I decided to give PHPBB3 another shot. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the installation process to recognize my Database credentials. After spending a half hour trying to fix it, I gave up and went with a WordPress plugin called SimplePress.

SimplePress is a forum wrapped up in a tidy WordPress plugin. It’s still impressive to me that a forum with a bunch of standard features can be bundled into a plugin but after ripping the default theme apart for 8 hours in a row to make the theme match the WPTavern main website, I decided that if I am truly going to build a community and not have to worry about converting to something else down the road, that spending money on VBulletin would be the way to go. I’ve always wanted an owned license anyways and on top of that, I found a forum style which matched for the most part, the design of the WPTavern website. Instead of hacking the theme for 8 hours, the VBulletin style only needed a half hour of my time.

Once I had the forum installed and the theme taking cared of, I had to go through the mundane process of creating forums, usergroups, permissions, guidelines, installing modifications, etc. Managing a forum is fun, but building it is boring.

What I wanted to share with you today is the lessons I’ve learned so far in my quest to build a community around my new project.

  • Get a core group of people ready: One of the best things to happen for me even before the actual launch of the forum is that there are a core group of 10-30 people who visit the forum on a regular basis. Many of those are already replying to forum threads or creating new ones. This means that when I go through the actual launch process, their will already be a considerable amount of content for new users to browse and interact with.
  • Staff members that are as passionate as you: While this one is tough, they don’t necessarily have to have the same passion as you just as long as they are interested in seeing the community thrive and succeed just as much as you are. Luckily for me, I’ve had 4-5 individuals which have stepped up to volunteer their time to help make WPTavern a thriving community. These people have already been instrumental in getting the forum going and it’s been great.
  • Be prepared for an exponential amount of work: This past week, my sleeping schedule has been non existent as I’ve spent 8-12 hours at a time working on this forum. On top of that, once the forum was accepting users, that is when I had to hammer out bugs, styling issues, user permissions, etc. I knew this coming in that running a forum would be a ton of hard work and so far, it has been. But if you have those core staff members, things sure do go much more smoothly.
  • Forums are addicting: At this stage of the game, there is already a good bit of content on the forum. So much so, that a new post or new thread seems to be happening a few times an hour or at least, a few times a day. When you have a group of people constantly adding new content to the forum, it can be really addicting to just sit on the forum and wait for the next post to be published so you can be the first one their to respond. However, at some point you’ll have to realize that you don’t have a ton of luxury time and that you must move on to get other things done.

Conclusion

So there you have it. What I’ve learned in the past seven days as it relates to building and preparing a forum for launch. At this time, I’d like to thank Patrick O’ Keefe for writing the Managing Online Forums book because it has become my forum bible. What a great resource of information to have on hand. Also a great resource is his downloadable templates which I used on my forum for the Staff Guidelines, and the general forum rules. These saved me a ton of time.

As I move on and continue with the WPTavern project, I’ll report back on what I’ve learned as I share my experiences with you.

New Versions Of Drupal Released

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A few days ago, two new versions of Drupal were released to the public, versions 6.9 and 5.15. According to the release post, these releases do not contain any new features but a number of bugs have been fixed along with a few critical security vulnerabilities. If you’re using Drupal, make sure to upgrade ASAP.

Perfcast Episode 20 – The Pre Launch

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Before launching your blog or website, there are a number of things worth considering. In this weeks edition of Perfcast, David Peralty and I cover a broad spectrum of things you should consider such as:

Before Spending Money
Idea
Niche
Potential Posts
Research (competition, friends)
Interaction (commenting, collecting resources)
Can I do this for a long time?

Domains
brainstorming (instantdomainsearch)
what to choose (preference, .com, .net, .org, country codes, .info?)
where to buy them (namecheap, godaddy, from Host)
next step – nameservers!!! (just because they are registered, doesn’t mean they are “attached” to your project)

Hosted vs Self Managed
The hosted blogging solution versus the self hosted solution
Similarities
Differences

Webhosting
Shared
VPS
Dedicated
– CLOUD HOSTING –
Control Panels (custom, cPanel, etc..)
Fantastico?
SSH?

Analytical statistics
Basics: Uniques, Page Views, Visitors, Bounce Rate
Different Services/Apps, Different Stats0

As you can see, we covered a ton of information and this is just for the prelaunch. Next week, we dive into Lesson 2 which is all about Launching The Blog.

LISTENER FEEDBACK – You can give us your feedback by shooting us an email at, [email protected] or leave a comment on this blog post.

LENGTH OF EPISODE – 1 Hour 5 Minutes

NEXT EPISODE – January 22nd, 2009 at 7 P.M. EST

ITUNES – Click here to subscribe to the show via iTunes

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode20.mp3

LISTEN TO EPISODE 20 OF PERFCAST:

Open Letter To Twitter Users

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To all those who use Twitter:

Please stop filling my public timeline with your automatically generated content. I don’t want to know your exact location. I don’t want to know what you just listened to on Last.FM. I don’t want to see what you just listened to or downloaded on iTunes. I don’t want to know what you just purchased. I don’t want to see your automatic welcome Tweets to new followers.

Have a nice day and thank you 🙂

Really, all of that information is what I consider to be crap if nothing else, noise. At this point, I follow 615 people on Twitter. The stream of information that is manually submitted to Twitter by these end users is what I am interested in the most. But you might be one of those people who thinks that streaming your Last.FM recently played tracks to Twitter would be an acceptable social thing to do so those who follow you can know the type of music you’re interested in. However, I am seriously wondering if Twitter is the appropriate place for people to be aggregating this information?

Why do I follow someone? It’s because of what the individual says in 140 characters or less. I could very well just block people or unfollow them to clean up my stream but in some aspects, it would be a shame to do so because these same people have very interesting things to say. I can’t control what they decide to aggregate through their account but I would like to see people aggregate that information to somewhere other than Twitter. Perhaps on a blog or an entirely separate Twitter account.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Cutline Version 1.4 Released

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Those of you who have been using the Cutline theme for WordPress will be pleased to know that the newest version (1.4) has been released which should work better with WordPress 2.7. This latest release contains support for post classes, threaded comments, image CSS classes and much more. 1.4 is an upgrade of 1.3 which is a two-column, right sidebar design. Although this is a major upgrade, most of the changes have taken place under the hood.

Make sure to head on over to Tubetorial to read the release post which goes into more detail. However, it must be noted that Cutline 1.4 will only work with WordPress 2.7 and above and not below.

A great job goes out to Sophia Lucero who has also done several other designs within the Splashpress Media Network.

Are you using Cutline on your WordPress powered blog?

Notepad++ My New Favorite Code Editor

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Unless you use a hosted blogging service such as WordPress.com or Blogger, chances are you’ve had to touch the code within your theme or blogging software of choice. For a longtime, I was a big fan of Dreamweaver. But that program is expensive. Once I got sick of the cost, I went out and searched the web for a free alternative. That’s when I stumbled across a piece of software called Aptana Studio. Aptana is opensource software available free of charge and in my mind, comes the closest to mimicking much of what I enjoyed with Dreamweaver such as the ability to perform code suggestions which I find to be very handy when messing around with CSS.

However, there are a couple of things with Aptana that have bothered me so much, I’ve moved on to a new piece of software called Notepad++.


Brownie points awarded to anyone who can guess what this code is part of

It seems like each time I open Aptana, there are 50 new updates I have to install. But the biggest annoyance for me is when I open up a PHP file for editing and try to SAVE THE FILE AS, a dialog box pops up asking me to save it as a project or something to that affect. Saving PHP files is a real pain in the rear.

With Notepad++, the software loads much faster than Aptana and once it does load, I’m not bombarded with news or updates that need to be installed. I don’t do much if any development work so using Notepad++ as a quick and easy editor of PHP and CSS files has worked well for me. The one thing I miss about Aptana is its ability to auto complete code or code suggestions. For example, if I type in the CSS property of background: into Aptana, a drop down list of variables is presented to me that I can click on to finish the statement. So far, I’ve not seen this feature in Notepad++ but if you know how to turn that on (if it exist) let me know.

I received a number of suggestions on Twitter on which code editor I should use but in the end, I’ve decided to go with Notepad++. It’s free, easy to install, and it’s quick to load. If you’re looking for a program to quickly edit code, this one should fit the bill.

Which editor do you use to edit or develop code?

Google Unveils The Open-Source Blog Converters Project

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Back on September 9th 2008, I published an article here on Performancing asking the question How Portable Is Your Blog? In the article, I discussed how great it would be if there was some sort of standard for allowing users to pick up their blog data and take it with them anywhere they go. The complexities involved though with each publishing platform seemingly doing things a different way has been a major roadblock towards this ever happening.

Fast forward to today and it looks like Google is going to grab the bull by the horns with their Blog Converters project.

This project contains a number of converters to and from different Blog services. The code is written in Python with scripts to execute the conversions either on the command-line, through a Windows batch script, or hosted on Google App Engine.

So far, the project has three different converters available for WordPress to Blogger, Blogger to WordPress, and Live Journal to Blogger. Not surprisingly, creating exporters so users can easily switch to Blogger are the first ones out of the bag but the great news is that Google has released the project under the Apache license. It’s open source which means people can add or modify the source code without any repercussions.

I’m pretty stoked about this project and as more converters are created, I’ll mention them here.

Are you looking to convert either from or to Blogger? What type of conversions are you most interested in seeing?

Choosing An Analytics Package

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One of the things I’ve been thinking about regarding the launch of my new project is which statistical package should I use? That is why yesterday, I published a poll asking you which one you use and it seems as though the majority of you are using Google Analytics. I’ve never used Google Analytics but I’ve become a big fan of Woopra. I’ve been told that no matter which statistics package I use, I should use GA because it’s the statistics package of choice which contains the metrics needed to base advertising rates on. It’s also a trusted source of accurate information which is why advertisers like it so much.

The accuracy argument could be debated as each program varies in their results. However, it’s hard to go against the grain and since I do plan on monetizing the site, not using GA from the beginning could prove detrimental to my efforts.

One last thing I wanted to mention. I know when I started my personal blog, statistics were the last thing on my mind. However, once I installed Woopra, I realized what I had been missing. The problem though is that, using a statistics package midstream doesn’t give you any information from the past. This is why it is important when launching a blog to also choose a analytics program that you feel you’ll be using for the long haul.

What are your suggestions? If you were starting a new blog or website, which one would you use?

By the way, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Performancing has their own statistics package in the form of Pmetrics. We have a free plan plus several premium plans. You also have the ability to create your own custom Pro plan during the upgrade process, with support for up to 200 sites and 250,000 total daily page views.

All new accounts get a free 21 day trial of the Pro service. You can upgrade any time during or after the trial.