My Community Board

Hello Everyone,

I have a community board for my friends ( dutch ) and their friends and so on! But everytime I redo the site, it goes well for 2, 3 months, and then no one posts anymore or anything. Now I am planning on redoing it 1 more time, and see if it goes well or not. But now I could use your fantastic knowledge on this field. What should I offer my visitors? And if you are like saying,GAMES, then tell me where to get them etc!

I was thinking of having a few friends of mine putting info on the site aswell, but none of my friends know html or anything so... i thought going for mambo, good or not good? I don't even know if mambo can have this, like 1 member has 1 section or something...

I was also thinking of having big games directory at my site, so load of games on my website, is this possible? if so how?

And how about online msn on my site, is that possible aswell?

I'm just throwing a few idea's in here, but I really need your help to finally get a grip on this site, and make it good FINALLY!

Thanks in advance! People who help me really really good, can even get a design from me ( custom designed that is )

I don't really know mambo but I do suggest having some sort of Content Management System as postnuke or phpnuke. You really don't need to know html at all to work those sites. Maybe start up a photo gallery or chat room or simply offer more diverse content and do what you can to build the site beyond your friends as their likely the most unreliable members you'll ever have, no offense, but it's true.

I have a few close friends that are on my sites and the rest are people they know with similar interests. I used to have many more friends on my sites but they rarely visit.

Also, load your site up with fresh content daily, spam your own forums, get things rolling. Your only going to get out of it what you put into it IMO.

Do you have a link to your site so we can see it?

Duke is absolutely right, plus spamming your own site and creating your own new content is essential to getting other people interested. If they don't see you posting anything new or see you having an interest then they won't show any in return, just a fact of websites.

Content Management Systems are the easiest way to go IMO because it takes a lot of the hard work out of looking after the site, even if you do have one or two friends who want to share news, it makes it really easy for them. Plus it really helps if your site has a point or a goal to work towards, making it to general can kill it as much as making it to specific but try finding a goal or a central theme for the site and working around that.

thanks guys, well I thought about this and yes I am going for a CMS, because my friends don't know html and stuff ( and i'm no coder either ).

So what cms system do you people recommend? It needs to be able to be skinable, and I want to be able to give certain people the ability to run a module ( that's what it's called yes? )

And I'm going for the fun subject. So LOADS of games if possible, and maybe an online msn, but I have no clue on how to get these!

Personally, I've done a fair amount of research lately and find that postnuke seems to be the preferred CMS at the moment. I also heard that a lot of talented postnuke coders have switched over to XOOPS and only know of one site that converted from postnuke to Mambo and have to say I preferred it when it was nuke.

It's really up to you which you use. I'm pretty sure there all skinnable with hundreds of existing templates for download. I think it really comes down to personal preference.

Ive heard many ppl like to use mambo ... On a site somewhere (ill try and find it again) its rated highest of all the free ones...

found it: http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.p...388&Itemid=143

I think I need to look up on XOOPS. Is it any good to me with my PHP ignorance?

I can't say all, but most of this open sourced software has a bit of a learning curve to learn if your editing code, but installing and running a website isn't really all that hard. I'm assuming with the growing popularity of CMS's such as XOOPS and Mambo that it must be pretty much the same.

I'm not 100% sure, but much of it is based on php anyway so if you don't like one CMS, you can change to another with little or no downtime and not that steep of a transition. This applies to the basic site only, I'm not sure how it applies to forums as many of them are ported for use with whatever CMS you chose.

so you'd say i'have to look up on xoops?

I don't know much about it, to be honest my preferred CMS is postnuke.