The blogging year starts of well. I bring to you the all new s3maphor3.org forum:

This forum is designed for discussions concerning the s3maphor3 projects, as well as general technical discussions. I welcome all of you to participate in it, please, have your say!

The solution is based on phpBB, which pretty much runs every internet forum out there. Setting up this forum took me only 3 hours. It involved the installation, configuration and the tweaking of styles. The result is a nice-looking, fully functional internet forum.

This exercise I did for two reasons. First, to further professionalize the s3maphor3.org site. Second, to get experience with standard internet software to build communities. Remember how I launched the s3maphor3.org support center last year:

(I even wrote an article on how to setup your own support center.)

Now, let's have a look at the ingredients I used to build this whole s3maphor3.org thingy. First, I use dirt-cheap PHP hosting at Servage. Then, I build the custom site. The layout is based on an open source CSS layout, so I could focus on the content, instead of building everything from scratch. Next, I added a support center, a professional web-based ticket system that takes about an hour to setup. Finally, I added the forum, which took about 3 hours. The result is quite a functional site, if I may say so myself.

My point to all this is that nowadays you can build a fully functional, professional site for your customer with very little effort and very low costs, by maximizing reuse from the community. I'm personally not in the market of small/medium businesses, but if you are, it makes sense to invest some time in learning about these possibilities. Besides, it is tons of fun.

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