MyBB Community Forums

One of the major issues that many of site owners face is that we have to integrate so many systems, there is never a neat tie in, in doing this and it creates a lot of issues.

The powerful plugin system of myBB and the ability to add your own hooks, means that there is certainly enough room to create a plugin that does a fair chunk of the content management side of things.

The way a lot of forums handle this is in my opinion ugly and wrong, there doesn't need to be a tie in directly to forums etc, and news can and in most situations should be seperate from the forums.

I am thinking therefore of writing a content delivery system. Rather than a full CMS which I think can be too bulky I will be looking instead of just writing a delivery system, that allows you to have users submit, edit and publish content items. This will consist of a page that lays out news in whatever format you want through a template and the ability to include in whatever CSS to do this that you want.

it will leverage the plugin system and hooks of myBB but have it's own level of permissions, though I guess that could be handled through the current permissions system too.

It wont be handling blocks and various things for now, as I can't see that as vital to what I am looking for. It will allow you to also create new pages and I may make its own navigation menu.

what this will achieve is give you the basics of a CMS and still allow you to have forums but also keep the seperate. It will likely have its own set of hooks to allow tie ins and a discuss bot as part of it.

I currently use Joomla, but by and large I use Joomla for the purpose of delivering news and other custom pages and many of the plugins I have created for Joomla can easily be written as part of myBB in a plugin format.

So I am thinking about writing this first to see if it is a viable option for me and if it is as a replacement for my front-end.

I think this could be a good balance, because the fact I am constantly having to upgrade multiple software and rewrite plugins and the fact I need to decide on whether I move from Joomla 1.5 to the latest versions, or move to wordpress, seems like this is worth investigating.

If there is interest let me know, because that will spur me on.

Dan

Sounds really cool to me. I would be interested in seeing it, though I'm not sure I have a use for it yet.

I know there are other users writing something like this, but I don't think there is any need to make it overly complex. It really just needs a way to post and manage content and let myBB handle the rest such as users etc.

The issue with CMS systems sometimes is that they are overly complex, usually sites like mine with large forums, really have the news and content secondary and most people visit the forums. If it is tied into the myBB template system with the ability to design it through a template, I think there is a good opportunity to make something both simple and practical and leverage the power that is already within myBB.

FYI my site is Silvertails.net and I will be looking to work in essentially the same content and system setup as I have there, I just don't use enough of the Joomla features to make it worthwhile staying when the same can be achieved through a simplified and single system. As long as the content is delivered in much the same way from a dom perspective and the URL system stays similar or the same, then there really isn't much in the trade off