Blog/forum integration

[Westech]

After browsing around many sites that have both blogs and forums (including this one), I'm surprised at how little integration there is between the blog and the forum. It seems that tighter integration would be a great way to draw blog users into participating in the forum and vice versa.

The auto-created forum threads used on this site to notify of new blog posts are a great start, but why are the blog and forum comments kept separate? Why not have comments posted on the blog appear in the forum thread and comments posted to the forum thread appear in the blog comments? Or, why not ditch the blog comments altogether and just put a "Discuss this post" link at the bottom of each blog entry that links to the forum thread?

I'm not picking on WP in particular, just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on why most sites keep their blogs and forums so separated from each other.

[Dan Morgan]

Good point, and oddly enough I was recently thinking about the same thing in relation to WP. For me, it was the fact that the new blog post alerts in the forum are (auto) created by Chris regardless of whether it is him or Shawn blogging. The preview in the forum was talking in the first person so there was some confusion about who was saying it - Shawn or Chris.

I guess it comes down to relatively quick integration to fulfil a purpose or more thorough integration. For example, if built from the the ground up would there be a "More/Comments..." link to the full article, or a link with more descriptive anchor text?

For me, a proper modular CMS with seamlessly integrated blog, article management and a forum would be the absolute holy grail for me, and one which I would happily pay money for. I am not talking about a CMS where each element needs dedicated top level features (a forum with a VB feature set for example) just something that does it, and is flexible enough to allow modification without ugly hacks to achieve what you want. Every time I update the software versions of my sites I have to rehack something I forgot about.

[Chris]

The issue is that it isn't standard software at the moment. Vbulletin only just released the RSS feed integration (what it is) this version. All RSS feeds are posts by the same username to the forum, in this case me, but I could also have just made a dummy user called "RSS Bot" and have it do it.

Then, there is also the issue of integration the user authentication systems of both.

I don't know if it'd be worth it considering all the work would likely have to be redone every upgrade.

However, one thing I might be able to do is include the most recent forum posts on the blog homepage.

[mondala]

After browsing around many sites that have both blogs and forums (including this one), I'm surprised at how little integration there is between the blog and the forum. It seems that tighter integration would be a great way to draw blog users into participating in the forum and vice versa.

The auto-created forum threads used on this site to notify of new blog posts are a great start, but why are the blog and forum comments kept separate? Why not have comments posted on the blog appear in the forum thread and comments posted to the forum thread appear in the blog comments? Or, why not ditch the blog comments altogether and just put a "Discuss this post" link at the bottom of each blog entry that links to the forum thread?

I'm not picking on WP in particular, just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on why most sites keep their blogs and forums so separated from each other.

I believe it's usually a limitation of the software available or time required to make what you have work. I'm not a programmer but I do know that managing usersystem integration and syndicating content between different scripts and all interacting with each other is a pain in the butt. I use Subdreamer CMS (and work for them) because though it is not perfect, it does do a lot of the integration that I'm looking for such as forums stats on the front page/top posters/posting articles directly into the forum/forum avatar shows under CMS comments etc... it could be better but on a case by case basis I often opt for Subdreamer with vBulletin. (Though it also supports phpbb/smf/ipb)

phpFox looks quite neat... I see that for version 2 of phpfox, they plan on adding default or support integration with vbulletin so that will really be something to keep an eye one. I know they same guy manages legal/license biz for phpfox and vbulletin.... i wonder if there programming teams are close.. maybe the integration will work well

[ses5909]

I'm building a site now that has a blog and forum and I am facing this dilemma now. There are certainly ways to get people who read the blogs to go to the forums and vice versa (as mentioned, posting most recent forum topics) or lets say Chris blogged about adsense. At the bottom of the blog he could post 5 forum topics that relate to adsense. It wouldn't be too hard to write a Wordpress plugin for that.

[deronsizemore]

Don't know if this helps anyone, but Expression Engine (http://www.pmachine.com) CMS has their own forum software and it integrates with their blogging/CMS software.

I'm using it to build a site with a forum now and although I've not reached the point to where I'm using the forum, I've read a lot and seen other EE sites using both and it seems great. A user can sign up for an account at your website and they automatically have an account at your forum as well by doing so. Seems very easy to display recent forum posts, etc from the forum inside your site template somewhere if you want to do so.

Maybe something you all want to check out if you're looking for this ability.

[GeorgeB]

On ZuneUser (http://www.zuneuser.com) I simply use vbadvanced to show a specific forum as my "blog".

I have permissions set so only the staff writers and I can post threads. That way a user has to register to reply to blog posts.

vBulletin is so much easier to post blogs with images and other media. I love using BBcode to post blog posts as well :)

P.S. there is a wordpress to VB bridge released on vbulletin.org.