Creating Forum for internal company

English Open Chat
#1

Hello everyone,

I’m the opensource nut at my company (which services MS networks) and I’ve been asked to set up an internal forum for our tech’s to use to sever much like a knowledge base. I’ve never set up any forums before and was wondering what YOU guys recommend to use. I’ve briefly looked at Joomla and it seems nice and fairly easy to use.

So… what do you recommend?

#2

Can you define the requirements? Sounds like something like a forum, like this one, or a wiki…or maybe both.

I’ve briefly looked at Joomla…

So have I; (to state the obvious) its a CMS, and while a CMS might do all you want, with the addition of suitable modules, maybe you don’t need a CMS.

I agree that Joomla! looks good, but currently my preference is Drupal. Possibly, the learning curve is a little shallower with Joomla! (although there is not a lot in it). The information that I had from experienced users was that there were far more visually attractive themes available for Joomla! than Drupal, but that’s not how I found it. Once I’d filtered out the themes that clearly wouldn’t meet my requirements (or, it wasn’t clear whether they would meet my requirements) i actually found that it was far more even and Drupal maybe even had a narrow lead.

If you like tick boxes (they have a limited area of use, but, if you know your requirements, they can be very useful, particularly in checking whether the functionality that you need is available for a particular CMS) have a look here. Or here. Or, err, here.

(In advance, I would have thought that I was going to like Plone best, but I didn’t.)

And security:

  • Just because its for use by your techs doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t exposed to the internet (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t)
  • quite a number of security exploits have involvement from internal actors, so you can’t ignore that, either

I just point this out because a number of books that you’ll see on Website design with a CMS don’t even mention security, which i find a little shocking…

#3

Do a search on a site like freshmeat.net under the appropriate categories: forum, cms, etc. You can also get some indication how popular the software is and how actively developed it is.

#4

danrche wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I’m the opensource nut at my company (which services MS networks) and
> I’ve been asked to set up an internal forum for our tech’s to use to
> sever much like a knowledge base. I’ve never set up any forums before
> and was wondering what YOU guys recommend to use. I’ve briefly looked at
> Joomla and it seems nice and fairly easy to use.
>
> So… what do you recommend?
>
>

If it’s just a forum… I like phpBB (and it’s variants and spinoffs and cousins).

Examples of phpBB in use are the gentoo forum, the linuxmint forum, linux format
forum, sabayon forum, archosfans, cacti, happypenguin, virtualbox, puppy linux,
debian user, dd-wrt, etc, etc, etc…

Probably one of the most popular forums in use out there.

#5

Also if it’s a knowledge base you might want to think whether it’s a Wiki you want. Wiki’s have user editable “permanent” pages, whereas forums are for threads of discussions. The software package might even have both features.

#6

If they are “static” pages for people to read, like a FAQ section, then a Wiki may do you well enough and gives you the flexibility of controlling who has access to view, edit or author. Our company is setting up a wiki for us to move all of the documentation over to instead of individual Word and PDF files.

A Forum may be better if there is a running dialog you want to make public, such as for help desk questions.