Best (and easiest) forum to integrate into RW?

gdawg

Hi,

What is the best and easiest forum to embed into a Rapidweaver site? It looks like some people have ad success with Vanilla.

Any input would be much appreciated. Thanks!

JezzerP

You can use any forum software you like, just add an offsite page link in your menu and send it to the forum url. I use phpBB forum software...easy to install and configure, plenty of free themes and add ons. phpbb.com/

mitchellm

Jeremy's comment is right. I've used offsite page links a lot. And in PHPBB (and others) it's easy to have a link back to the main site in the header area of the forum.

Vanilla does make it very easy to integrate the forum into the existing website. In the end I decided not to go this route because I found a forum totally integrated with current website was a bit distracting, and also there were some stylistic things I didn't like about Vanilla. However, those were personal stylistic decisions: you might find you really like Vanilla fully integrated into your site.

Easy enough to start with Vanilla, see how you like it, then go to something else if it doesn't really meet your needs.

gdawg

Great, thanks guys. Is there a step-by-step guide out there for embedding Vanilla (if I choose to go that route)?

mitchellm

I can't remember exactly how I did this. Either there were simple instructions posted on this forum (do a search for Vanilla postings) OR there were very easy directions for how to do this posted at the Vanilla forum website.

I may have used these directions:
http://www.rapidanswers.net/index.php?title=Adding_a_Vanilla_Forum_to_a_Site

Wish I could be more helpful. I do remember it was simple once I found the directions. (This is leaving out the whole setting up Vanilla with a mySQL database issue.)

gdawg

That looks great. Thanks!