A little guidance please

[Robeaux]

I'm looking at moving my current website to a different CMS, but I want to make sure it's easy to integrate with SMF. My current site uses PHP-Fusion, which comes with a forum app built in, but I'm not happy with how the forum works. My site has been up for about 3 years and 95% of the content is in the forums, so basically I want to build the site around the forum app. I love SMF and want to build the site around it.

I've tried Joomla!, but that's major overkill for what I'm doing (not to mention how hard it is to find a working bridge nowadays ). I've looked for something easier to use, but there are hxxp:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems [nonactive] of CMSs out there. Has anyone had really good luck with any particular one?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

[ExcalibursZone]

Well, what are your goals with the CMS if the majority of your site is in the forums? What do you want to do other than use forum software? It might benefit you to just write one or two pages to handle the stuff that the forums don't support.

[danp_canucks]

Unless the databases are pretty congruent, you are going to have some fun doing ETL.

[Robeaux]

Thanks for the replies!

Well, what are your goals with the CMS if the majority of your site is in the forums? What do you want to do other than use forum software? It might benefit you to just write one or two pages to handle the stuff that the forums don't support.

My site is for a gaming guild, so there is a use for news, blogs and a gallery, but the majority of the activity from the users is in the forums. PHPFusion does everything I need, but the forums are lacking big time, and that's the part I need to be the best.

Unless the databases are pretty congruent, you are going to have some fun doing ETL.

Heheh...yeah, I thought about that but I'm not going to hassle with it. I'm just going to archive the old site and lock it down. Anything that we feel needs to be moved we'll just do it manually. I know it's lazy, but most threads die after a couple of days anyway.

[ExcalibursZone]

Well, if you're willing to start from scratch, in terms of the forums, I'd suggest you do a few things. This is what I'd do if the forums were the most popular part of the site:

- Use SMF to run everything. This means, you will build the other parts of your site as you need them and use SMF for your user management and forum software.

- For news: Use SSI.php to pull the recent posts from the news board. You can then use the CSS from your SMF theme to handle the look and feel of the news on your main page.

- Use Gallery/Gallery2 for your gallery needs since there is a nice bridge for that software listed here.

- Blogs are troublesome, but you might be able to get around that in a tricky way. What if you used SMF to represent a blog and based on the URL someone uses, you can pull up an individual's "blog posts"? Which would more or less be the postings in a board in which a user is the moderator. There are other options to be sure, but this might be a nice way to do it...

- There is a mediawiki->smf bridge for wiki-related stuff.

If you're dead set on a CMS, though, I would suggest TinyPortal which is made for SMF. Though, I prefer to not mess with them since I'm the only one doing the changes on my site But there are nifty ways to use SMF in other venues other than as forum software (The blog Idea I just came up with... heh and I really like that idea, actually). There are things that will be missing if you're not dedicated to writing your own stuff, but if you are, you could have a pretty nice site based entirely off of SMF.

[Robeaux]

Thanks a ton for the suggestions! I am starting from scratch, so these are really helpful.

I'm new to SMF and didn't know about the news & gallery options, I'll check them out. I saw TinyPortal and was leaning towards that. Now I just need to find a few more hours in the day to play around with them.

Thanks again!

[ExcalibursZone]

Not a problem, let us know what you did