Grow Your ForumsEducating You on Forums

First off, I have bumped up my posting schedule to once a week

This week I will be talking about adding a forum to popular CMS, Joomla.

Do you have a website that is powered by Joomla and want to integrate a forum into it? There are many ways that you can do that, with either a bridge, a module or a component. The most obvious one would be the Fireboard or Joomlaboard. There are also integration modules for SMF, and phpBB

They range from being fairly east to being complete headscratchers. If you read the instructions that come with the download step by step then you shouldn’t have a problem. You can find these “hacks” at http://extensions.joomla.org, joomlahacks.com and by doing a simple Google search for “Joomlaboard” or “integrate forums with joomla”

The fireboard can be a bit buggy and personally I don’t like it. I personally wouldn’t want to have my forum connected with Joomla because if I were to miss something up then the whole site would go down and I would probably have to rebuild either the forum or the website.

Popularity: 48% [?]

We have now added a new forums directory to our site. It is available at directory.growyourforums.com. Feel free to submit your forums as long as the content isn’t adult, warez or illegal. Featured links are 10.95 for a lifetime! We are not looking to make truckloads of money, just enough to pay the hosting bills .

Regular links are free, and the reciprocal link is entirely optional! So that would mean a free backlink! Of course, the directory is no-follow free so it will help boost your search engine ranking. Of course, it would be nice to have some links back to here, hint hint.

I am currently compiling a list of free and paid directories and am collecting alexa and google PR for them so check back in two weeks

Popularity: 47% [?]

I would recommend that people just starting out with forums use a free forum software. That way if you decide that you don’t want to use forums, it won’t be a waste of your money. For my own forum I have decided to use phpBB3 due to having a low budget. Again, I recommend anyone who has a low budget go with free forum software. The top two free forum softwares that are well known are phpBB and SMF (Simple Machines Forum). There are a number of free forum hosting websites that offer phpBB or SMF. I will be discussing these at a later date.

Paid forum softwares are good too. They are more likely to have more features, and are highly customizable. The top two paid forum softwares that I would recommend are vBulletin and IPB. Many professional websites use vBulletin, and there are currently no free hosting for this software. IPB (Invision Power Board), is also a well known paid forum software which unlike vBulletin, is offered for free by many free forum hosting websites.

All things considered, it comes down to the forum owners choice. My recommendation would be to go with either SMF or phpBB. Although, it does take a bit more work to customize and maintain, it won’t drain your finances and you would have some extra money in your budget.

Popularity: 59% [?]