Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress

The Internet has become a virtual meeting place for friends, business partners, and others with common interests. Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress is your guide to creating your own virtual meeting place, or online community. No programming experience is necessary to get up and running with the solutions provided in this book. Each of the applications has been chosen for ease of use and for the stellar community behind the project. Three applications, each covering a different type of community building application, are covered in this book.

• Drupal is a content management system (CMS) that provides the framework and basic functionality for building feature-rich and dynamic web sites. It greatly simplifies the process of authoring, managing, and publishing content-such as text, images, files, and audio-to the Web. Robert T. Douglass, the author for this section, is an active contributor to the Drupal project and a freelance Drupal consultant.

• phpBB is the most popular Open Source forum software available. The community behind this software is simply immense. If it doesn't have a feature you need built in, you are certain to find that someone in the community has already written a modification to do exactly what you need. Tared W. Smith, this section's author, has been a support team member at one of those great community sites, phpBBHacks.com.

• WordPress is the blogging software of choice for the blogging community. Its drop-in-and-go theme system and the vast array of plug-ins enable it to fit everyone's needs, from the political pundit to the technology blogger. The author for this section, Mike Little, is one of the founders of the WordPress project and still an active contributor.

The book takes a divide-and-conquer approach, covering each application in its own section. By the conclusion of this book you will be prepared to create your own online community with any of the three.