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Interesting... so is this going to be "a better PHPBB / IP.Board / Forumcircle" or something much more customisable? It sounds like the latter, but it would be

by IsaacL 14y ago

Interesting... so is this going to be "a better PHPBB / IP.Board / Forumcircle" or something much more customisable? It sounds like the latter, but it would be interesting to hear how that would work. A good plugin architecture, and ecosystem of plugin writers, would probably be key, at least down the road. My recent freelance projects have been in Wordpress and Magento and IPBoard ... all powerful frameworks with a rich amount of plugins available. Makes for tedious dev work though -- "here's a plugin that does 90% of what the client wants, let's just randomly change PHP code I don't understand until I've implemented the other 90%". If you can fix that problem, that'd be something special.

buro9 14y ago
A lot of my users work for agencies in London, and what they've asked for is an API that powers everything, and an open web app that runs from it and which the users see. They do want the ability to extend the data structure and query things in their own way, but mostly they want the ability to pick up a forum and deeply integrate it into their projects, or to take their project and deeply integrate it into the forum. What I've got are users, designers and agencies telling me: 1) Give me an API that does everything so that we can make our own mobile apps for it. 2) Give me full and unrestricted access to the entire front-end so that we can do whatever we want with it. 3) Give me some way in the future to extend or associate data in your API. Which ultimately has shaped the design as: You create a forum/site on the platform, and we'll give you a dedicated API for your forum. We'll also give you a simply customisable forum front-end in Django. You can take the Django front-end and host it yourself if you want, and butcher it to your heart's content... making it whatever you want it to be, and we continue to solve the storage, searching, problems via the API. In essence, there's two parts to it. One part extensible (the API), and the other part 100% within your control (the front end web app). But if you're not technically inclined and just wanted a forum already, then you got that in 30 seconds and it was really simple to change the look and feel so that your community has it's own strong identity. We actually see a far bigger market in the space of the non-technical wanting forums. I've setup or helped so many forums over the years, and honestly... most would just love to get something running today, not have to learn how to be a sysadmin, and to not have to worry about security issues and updating the forum software.

by IsaacL 14y ago

buro9 14y ago

A lot of my users work for agencies in London, and what they've asked for is an API that powers everything, and an open web app that runs from it and which the users see. They do want the ability to extend the data structure and query things in their own way, but mostly they want the ability to pick up a forum and deeply integrate it into their projects, or to take their project and deeply integrate it into the forum. What I've got are users, designers and agencies telling me: 1) Give me an API that does everything so that we can make our own mobile apps for it. 2) Give me full and unrestricted access to the entire front-end so that we can do whatever we want with it. 3) Give me some way in the future to extend or associate data in your API. Which ultimately has shaped the design as: You create a forum/site on the platform, and we'll give you a dedicated API for your forum. We'll also give you a simply customisable forum front-end in Django. You can take the Django front-end and host it yourself if you want, and butcher it to your heart's content... making it whatever you want it to be, and we continue to solve the storage, searching, problems via the API. In essence, there's two parts to it. One part extensible (the API), and the other part 100% within your control (the front end web app). But if you're not technically inclined and just wanted a forum already, then you got that in 30 seconds and it was really simple to change the look and feel so that your community has it's own strong identity. We actually see a far bigger market in the space of the non-technical wanting forums. I've setup or helped so many forums over the years, and honestly... most would just love to get something running today, not have to learn how to be a sysadmin, and to not have to worry about security issues and updating the forum software.