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I have been experimenting Wordpress blog platform since I know how to install, tweak and use it for the last two years. I have compared it with Drupal - and still find out that Wordpress is far more superior - in certain areas that I am comfortable with. Other community portal like phpNuke, Geeklog, Joomla and Typo3 looks really “geeky”, and I don’t think it is “suitable”. I tried it for a few moments as it comes with my cPanel Fantastico package.

4 months ago, I decided to use Wordpress (not Wordpress MU) as a community portal for my alumni school association. At first, I tried to use Wordpress MU, but I found it really difficult to install with my existing experiences and knowledge of setting up a Wordpress blog.

My alumni background is mostly “professional”, age 30, have some computer and internet knowledge and really few know what is a blog. They don’t even know or heard about Wordpress and they don’t even care.

Basically we just need one nice and easy platform so that we can share our stories together and reconnect our long lost relationship since we left our secondary school in 1994. The website/portal is also functioning as a “message board system” which we could use it to announce events and happenings around our community.

What I did was just set up a new Wordpress blog and choose a theme that is more “portal like” presentation, compared to “blog like” presentation. Rockinthemes.com and Solostream.com are the places that I found very nice Wordpress themes that is suitable for a “community portal”. I used RockinPaper 3 column for the first few months, until I decided last week, to change it to Zeke1.0+widgets to be the latest theme.

rockinpaper

zeke 1.0

After completing the installation and change default Wordpress theme to the one above, I need to get everybody to be involve in posting their entry into the portal. I appointed one of my good friend as co-administrator, (so that if I am not around, somebody is there to have a look on the portal) and changed the “New User Default Role” to “Author”, so that new registered members can post anything they want, without the need of administrator moderation. I do that because members are my ex-schoolmates, and we know each other well. I also have warned them to do self-censorship before posting any post.

Wordpress installation, by default is best suits for bloggers. Transforming it to become a portal need special plugins so that it can function properly as a community portal. These are some of the plugins that I use to enhance the usability of Wordpress platform.

  1. UserOnline - a nice plugin for admin and members who is browsing the website, as it shows real time guest, member and bot online. Other members will know who is online.
  2. Email Users - ease up my task as an admin to send announcement email to the members. I used to export the emails that I catch from user registration into phplist and send mass email from phplist, but after finding the plugin, it’s just speed up my tasks.
  3. Subscribe to Comments - another plugin that “connect” members with comments and discussions. Members who leave comments (and they have to be logged in to do that), have an option to subscribe to the post comments. So, whenever any other members put a new comment, they will automatically get informed.
  4. cforms II - the best contact form available for Wordpress. I can customize almost all the fields and variables to make a very nice contact forms. And they have their own beautiful form templates to choose.
  5. KB Countdown Widget - a plugin that count the years/months/days since, until, or between events. A good plugin that I use to broadcast our yearly event, STAR OBW.
  6. WP-Sticky - the problem with Wordpress is that by default, new post will be published above the older ones. Unless we use this plugin, an announcement post for the members also can be pushed down if other members post a new entry. By having this plugin, admin can make sure that the post sticks on the first post of the homepage, so that everybody could view the post before reading other ordinary posts.

Want to see the Wordpress as a community portal? Check out www.starian94.com.

drizad :: Oct.09.2007 :: Site Management :: 2 Comments »