Articulating articles

[Arantor]

I think a lot about a lot of things. And of course this includes methods of content dissemination.

We all know content is king, we all know that to pull people into a community you need that sweet, sweet authoritative content.

What intrigues me are the ways people play it out and how this produces some... interesting... feedback cycles.

1. WP+forum, have the forum for the community, the WP for articles. Has a high tech factor, high maintenance factor. But can lead to some better engagement of the blog content.
2. Forum + articles addon - lower complexity and maintenance, but inevitably produces some weird combinations of 'you make an article, you make a topic to link to the article' and split the traffic with that extra hump.
3. Forum board with restricted permissions - lowest complexity but tends to produce a feeling that it's not special compared to the rest of content.

I am mostly thinking of XF solutions for the above, whether that's WP-XF bridging or AMS but it feels... either too much or not enough. IPS doesn't quite land the feeling I think I'm thinking of either, because the only way I can visualise how that should work tends to end up abusing the blogs feature which never feels right to me.

Anyone seen anything else? More importantly, anyone seen anything else that feels fluid?

I have the seed of an idea, it might even go somewhere but I don't want to have to invest in building the tech myself. I'd like ideally a low maintenance solution where I can pay someone to make me a theme that looks nice enough and lets me worry about the content.

 

[Ravenfreak]

There's always CMS in general other than WP, but they're not much different from WP. You've got Joomla, Drupal and then ones like phpNuke. These platforms usually have additional plugins like a forum plugin you can easily install of course. I can't say I've come across communities that use just forums with restricted permissions for articles, that's interesting.

 

[Nomad]

I have no experience with using article ad ons on forums but I have published blog posts on a regular forum. If you intent to use blog and forum, I think wordpress with a forum plugin is better.

 

[joelr]

Some thoughts:
1. I only clicked on this topic for its clickbaity topic title. I was hoping you would articulate the articles!
2. If you're viewing this question from the perspective of IPS, it would be Forums + Pages. Pages is the article management system for IPS, not Blogs.
3. If you're looking for an ideal state, what I've always envisioned for the future of IPS is for them to offer content hubs where the hubs would contain mixed content types. This means a hub could contain include full length articles, or forum discussions, or polls, or q&a, or files, or a gallery album. You could have a hub only with full length articles, or you could have a hub that seamlessly mixes articles and forum discussions.

 

[Arantor]

The whole point of the clickbait title was to get people in to discuss this very point.

As for IPS, I’ve got an install, I’ve played around with it in various ways for this, and it’s never quite given me the feel I want, but I suspect this is as much on my inability to reason out the hard requirements as it is my lack of deep familiarity with the nuance, maybe I should give it another go when 5 comes around. (Already renewed my licence… c’mon IPS, I want to see what else you have in store)

This is not helped by recent matters at work that are consuming much of my general problem solving and requirements gathering mojo, I figured I’d get something moving on the pieces in the meantime…

(The subject matter I had in mind for this project is evergreen, the material I have to share and my specific point of view on it is mostly just sitting waiting for its chance to get out in the sunlight. I have other challenges in presenting the content beyond this, but this was the place to start.)