Forums/How Do I ... ?
Add a Forum to your site
Michael Slater
posted this on June 10, 2010, 17:52
Webvanta doesn't include a built-in forum feature. If you need a forum as part of your site, there are several hosted services you can use to embed a forum in your Webvanta site. Some services to check out:
- Tal.ki
- SparkBB
- Nabble
- ActiveBoard
- Vanilla Forums
- Ninja Post
- ZetaBoards
- Lefora
- Zoho Discussions
- Zendesk (support forums, what you're reading now)
You can integrate your Webvanta site and your forum in two ways. The best approach is to use Webvanta to host the entire site, with the forum presented as an embedded widget in a Webvanta page. Most of the forum services listed above support this.
Another approach, which you can use for any hosted service, is to use subdomains for the two services and just link back and forth between then. For example, www.mysite.com could be your Webvanta site, and forum.mysite.com could be your forum. If you style both of them with the same header, you can make them feel almost like part of one site.
Comments
Further Forums -
I've briefly looked at the forums Michael mentioned but non have jumped out at me. I am getting comments on my blog but it seems difficult to start a conversation and even to find them because they are on the individual blog page. I figure a person will read a blog post and maybe post a comment and then move on never to return to the post and comments.
Alternatives I've thought of are:
1) Comment page where all comments from all posts are aggregated
2) Email - if you post and someone posts a comment after your you get an email saying - X responded to your comment.
3) A forum - like Michael listed
4) Build a forum - Webvanta doesn't have a built in forum feature but why not build one shouldn't be too bad - Maybe I'll do this after I get my tags implemented.
5) What are we using now - Zendesk?
Any practical suggestions?
Tom
We will eventually build a forum into Webvanta but we have other things that are higher on our priority list and are going to keep us occupied for the next six months or so. Unless someone wants to fund the forum work as a custom project -- we're always happy to accelerate features that someone is willing to fund.
This support forum is Zendesk.
You could build a page that aggregates all comments. Just create a loop to iterate through all the blog posts, display on the title of the post, and then you can use the code from the post page to display all the comments below each post title.