Using an Online Forum as a BLOG?

Sounds silly to me. With a multi-user blog you can typically have the option to select a specific person and all their entried appear. With a forum you can't control who posts at a specific thread level.

Silly huh? I guess I was hoping for a little better feedback then someone just calling it silly. It may not be possible in a forum setting...but that is why I am asking.

My goal may not be a standard BLOG setup but the concept has some merit. I agree that in a forum setting it may not be possible or the best implementation of such an idea but I felt maybe someone else would have integrated such a thing into a forum.

Example would be this site...from the looks of the way the BLOG section is setup it is using the forum engine to run it. Again, I ask because I do not know and am very interested in learning more.

Especially for the site I am developing...people love to talk about their life...that is why Blogs are so popular and what better life event then your wedding to chat about.

Peace,

DJ Bill

What a stupid idea, dj bill! JUST KIDDING :) I think Stewart's point was, if you want something that works like a blog, why not just use a blog system? The open-source Wordpress is free, very easy to use, and supports multiple users.

Now, I too have considered creating a blog-like system from phpBB. There are reasons you may want to do something like this. For example, if you have a community site that has a forum, and you also want to give people blogs, you don't want two seperate systems or two seperate authentication databases. No, you want a single login for your whole system. Of course, there are ways to integrate logins between different systems, but it's always a messy hack.

I think you are correct--I think dani has heavily modified vBulletin to do some really cool stuff. For example, the daniweb blogs.

I haven't thought the whole process through yet, but at least with phpBB, I don't think it would really be that big a deal. You can already create threads that are locked to posts except from the moderator. That "moderator" could be the blog author. You'd probably want to modify the page that spits out a thread to remove the author's name from being displayed for every post since you know the entire blog is one person. I think you'd hack a system where you'd create a thread, assign a moderator account to it, and lock the thread so only the moderator can post. Then you assign a single thread as the "comment thread" to the blog thread. Definitely would take some hacking, but not rocket science for sure.

Maybe csgal will respond. She definitely has experience with this subject.

Hmm. I know of three phpBB mods that will turn your forum into a blog-like thing. There is phpbb_fetch_all, phpBB Blog, and another one you can find in the phpBB mod support forums. I don't remember the name of it.

Anyway, phpBB Blog is something I wrote. There are lots of people using it. I'm a little nervous to link to it here, as I see a few people who have done such linking caught the attention of the mods. But you can look in my profile, it has a link to my site, and there you'll find phpBB Blog. Of the three products, mine is the most blog-ish. It has trackbacks, RSS, optional podcasting, all the GEO-location stuff, and a simple, blogger-like design. However, big limitation: it was built just to turn a forum into a list of blog entries. It doesn't give each user their own blog, although if they post in a forum, that would appear on the blog.

phpbb_fetch_all can be found via Google search. It is really cool, but it requires a lot of technical work. It's not really a blog. It just provides a way to embed forum stuff pretty much anywhere -- include the most recent posts on your home page, or list out the top posters, or show who's online. There are no trackbacks, no podcasting, etc. However, it does keep the phpBB style, it follows the phpBB security settings, and it's very versatile.

The other blog product, the one you can hunt down in the official phpBB support forums, DOES give each member a blog. You don't post to a forum to do it. Instead, posts to the forum stay in the forum as normal. However, you can go into your profile page, and enter a blog there. Then anyone who views your profile will be able to read your blog entries. That stikes me as lame, but oh man does it have a lot of fans.

-Tony

you could just assign different permissions to different users ie the blog authors and the comment writers.

give each blog author their own board/topic area for their blog and then there would be a blog thread and a comment thread in each one.

I don't think it would be a big job, they would just be assigned to different membership groups.

does that make sense?

Thanks alot for your post. It is really helpful. I am trying to add forum elements to my website and you set me off (for phpbb_fetch_all) in a new direction which I appreciate...Nick

I am so confused I don't know quite where to start. I want to put a bulletin / message board on my site so that my customers, parents, can chat amongst themselves about ongoing topics. Is this possible? I have read about phpbb and vbulletins, but don't seem to understand how they work and what to do with them exactly. Is there any specific help guides for this?

Thanks in advance...
Torrie

ps: What is a thread? I heard someone getting bashed for using an old one.... ??

Thanks for the post and thank you for sharing

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned already (I'm too lazy to read this entire thread) but vBulletin forum system is about to release add-on blogging software that integrates with their forums.

Oddly enough, I've been pondering on how to add blogging type software to my site. I've realised that I have unwittingly built a forum from scratch, although it is not called a forum and does not use the usual terms, posts, topics, threads etc. It also has around 25,000 categories, which, fortunately I did not have to insert one at a time.
I am at present researching building blogs to enable me to use trackback and pingback and various other bits of functionality that come supplied with wordpress, vbulletin etc. I will post again when I know what I'm talking about.
I think your site idea has merit and is along the lines of some of the things I intend to add to my site. Best of luck.

Blog can work nice if you've good community.

I am starting up a wedding forum. I want to have a place where brides can log in and basically talk about their wedding day prep and planning. Kinda like a blog but a little different I guess.

That is exactly what I was thinking about from couple of days for my next forums.

Have u completed it??

Clara