There are lots of open source Bulletin Board or Forum packages out there, each with its own set of strong points and weak.
But the market seems to be trending toward “communities” that offer discussion forums, per-user blogging and per-user photo galleries all in one package–where users might (for instance) discuss boat building techniques, blog about their individual boat building projects and display individual, user-by-user galleries of boat photos. Or model airplanes or birding or what ever.
Pricey proprietary packages offering all of above are popping up like forest mushrooms in May. Are there any open source packages that offer all three (forum, user blogs and user galleries) all at once? I posted this here in the PHP forum because I’m a PHP programmer. But I’d consider using something written in other languages too.
I guess this means no such open source package (forum plus per-user blogs plus per-user photo galleries) exists. Another thing on my personal wish list would be a CMS that allows forum-like user comments to be attached to arbitrary or configurable interior pages on the website…So, for instance, if my website displays a photo of a hotrod car users could make comments that appear in a pop-up mouse-over window. I might work on that one myself, as a plugin to my own favorite CMS. Putting all of this into a single, comprehensive package would be hot.
“Community” is what the web is all about. People want to go to places (like this forum, Facebook, Google+ etc) where there is something new each day, and where they themselves can get noticed by saying something that everybody else reads. Forums are great. But forums are last century now. Forums need to be more like subdivisions where people build a house, plant photos, mow the grass and plant their digital gardens.