Forum

Nightshiftguy

Right guys.. What i want..

A webaddress
a forum
Email addresses to match the web address.

something simple. Its gonna be for an owners club.

Any advice / direction greatly appriciated.

This is a trial project to see how it goes!

Matt

Rollo Tamasi

Do you want to do it yourself or get someone else to do it? Are you looking for a quote or just looking for pointers as to where to get the domain/email/forum setup...?

Forum wise you can pay for both Invision/VBulletin (approx 85euro pa)but PHPBB/PUNBB and Vanilla are free. Vanilla is really nice actually and will no doubt have less security vulnerabilities over PHPBB. But PHPBB has more functionality.

Domain/Hosting/Email wise you can go either Irish or international but you're probably best served by going local if it's a small site. I'd recommend Blacknight Hosting. You're email address is matched to your domain name and is provided by your host.



What's a owners club?
Go to the OSWD for free CSS/HTML templates.

Nightshiftguy

HI

thanks for your post.

Right well I was considering doing it my self but looking at both options. So give me an idea if your willing to quote.

I am looking for something simple at first. something i can upgrade in the future if all picks up. But again something i can control from home.


are .eu sites available yet


The owners club will be a classic and current Fiat owners club.

I am members of 2 uk sites www.bravo-guide.co.uk and www.fiatforum.com there great but based in the uk. Looking to start somethign for irish ppl. All fiat owners and age any fiat car.

Rollo Tamasi

Are you the only person involved? If there are more than one and if you will have a few contributors then I would recommend getting a CMS. A CMS, content management system, allows you to login to a site and update it's content on the fly and create new sections and all that stuff

There is a load of good open source, free, CMS's out there. The major one is Joomla. I'm not a great fan of it myself but it would suit your purpose. All you really need to do with it is to design a template or you could download/buy a template from the many websites that support Joomla. There is a demo of it on their website < www.joomla.org

Joomla also comes with its own integrated forum too which is quite nice. It works quite well actually because lets say you have a joomla site and a phpbb forum then it's a little bit difficult to combine the two but if you use the joomla forum then you have an advantage already as they share the same database and you could add some mods and stuff rather easily. Demo of that at http://forum.joomla.org/

PHPBB, the major free forum, also has it's own CMS which it recently launched called Subdreamer. You might want to check that out too.
www.phpbb.com | http://www.subdreamer.com/

.EU domains are available but they are yet to prove their worth imo, it's still too early to determine if they will have the same success as the .net's .com's. If your site is directed at Irish fiat users then you should consider getting an .ie domain. .IE's are expensive though, you're looking at over E50 p.a while a .com/.net costs approx E10 p.a. There is some paper work you need to do too to be accepted for an .ie but it's rather simple if you can justify the need for the .ie domain. Having your hosting in Ireland and an Irish domain name will serve you will in the search engines too. If you can't get an .ie then .com/.net are the only real viable alternatives. Personally I prefer .net's for community based websites and .com's for commercial based websites.

I wouldn't give a quote on this as I’m not employed in the web development industry myself but it wouldn't be too difficult to get this off the ground if you go the CMS route as there would be no real coding invloved as the code is already provided by the CMS, the only delay would be in the design on the templates.

Since your website is going to be forum/community based you're more than likely going to have to get Linux (PHP/MYSQL/APACHE) hosting.

delta36

Hey! A new guy has entered. Anywhoo..
The completely free way to do it:
My site is costing me absolutely nothing to host.
Step 1: Go to www.atspace.com
and you can set up a site for free, ad free
Step 2: Go to www.ne1.net , where you can get free page rdirection, whichj is also ad free. Your site would be www.whatever.r8.org
Step 3: Thats it
If you're looking for a forum, try phpbb, as mentioned above, I use it for my site and it is fantastic, very customizable.
Oh and atspace.com alsop gives you email addresses linked to your website name.
That is the free way to do it. Hoped this helped.:D
Visit my site, which i host using atspace, and which has a forum on it:
www.stargateatlantisportal.r8.org

matu

i think that is a great way to do it if your starting off, but if you want to make it I think Rollo advice on this one was better. FREE means limited you cnat run a site or forum like this in the long run, it is just to messy and is very unstable.