@LB:
1.
What he said
2.
Will you be using the Joomla version?- implementing the CMS and using the wiki and Forum as plug-ins? This seems to fit the ECF site the best (though perhaps not the easiest to implement, at first).
Or are you moving completely over to CMS? If so, how will that change the rest of the site? (other than the "cover page" so to speak)
Yes, we've decided to use Joomla. Drupal might have been a better choice in some circumstances but Joomla fits the bill here.
The forum and cms will be independent. There will be links out of each to the other. The forum won't be a cms plugin because it is far too big, and also we don't want to bridge it either, there are always issues with that.
The cms will be small potatoes for a time. It will have some excellent material to start, and will grow naturally. In terms of size / scale, the cms, at least at first, will be 1% of the size of the forum (or less actually). However - it will present the content that is judged to be the most useful, and that can best be organized for standard website publishing.
The wiki: its future is not determined at present. If it actually worked as designed (ie, many people contributed to it) then I think it would be best to leave it as-is. However, it seems to me that it is mainly the work of one person, who has worked hard to make it what it is.
That makes the decision a little difficult. If that person would like to transfer the information to the CMS, in due time, it might be best. Everything that exists in the wiki would be the same in the cms, there aren't really any issues there, and it will be easier to edit as well. However I'm not going to force that, I'd prefer to see how things develop. There is a lot of good info in the wiki, as a result of much hard work, and I have to respect that.
As far as the ECF site appearance and future plans go: the forum is the main part of the site and always will be. However, a forum is basically anarchy as far as organizing material and finding it quickly is concerned, so at a certain point a giant site has to make some tough decisions.
If you are just a forum, and have no resources, then it's OK to stay as a forum. But if you have a growing library of resources, then a forum is too disorganized to handle that aspect efficiently, and something has to be done about it. For example if you look at the list of the world's largest forums on big-boards.com, you'll see that those sites with wider resources changed from a forum index front page to a cms front page, in order to organize and present their assets better.
This is what we're doing. The front page will change but the forum stays as-is. It will appear to be a major change, because the front page will be different, but keep in mind the cms will have 10 pages to start with, but the forum has hundreds of thousands. What we'll do is have massive links from the front page to the forum, so it can be found very easily. And if you have bookmarks, they won't change - you'll just go straight to the forum index or the board you wanted, as per normal.
In fact if your bookmark for ECF is what it most likely is:
www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/
...then you won't even be aware of any change at all. It's only if you follow a link out of the forum to the new Home page that you'll see the new front page. Or if you type the straight domain in, of course:
www.e-cigarette-forum.com
The cms will allow us to move onward and upward, as ever. It's a bit of a technical challenge, and a shift of thinking perhaps for long-term members though (and maybe the biggest obstacle), so some other forums open a whole new site just for this purpose. I don't agree with that approach though - it's better for the site if the two sections are combined, it's better for existing members once they've got their head around it, and it's about a million times better for visitors and new members.
Our cms will be very simple to start with, but to see what is possible try these:
BBC News - Home
BBC - Homepage
Telegraph.co.uk: news, business, sport, the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Sunday Telegraph - Telegraph
These are examples of giant portal cms sites. I include these because I know them well and because they are good examples of the type. The BBC site is an example of one of the best-run giant portals in the world: it's fast, easy to use, and has many different topic sections, some on different domains. The Telegraph site in contrast is hard to use as it's so slow, it has chronic usability issues due to poor advertising management - but it has a lot of interesting content if you can just get to it. (The Telegraph is a big UK paper like the Times, but with a little more humour.)
Needless to say, the ECF cms will not be on this scale. However you can see what is possible, with these two examples. The key is that any page can be edited at any time by the Editor who 'owns' it, which means that info stays current. In addition, just about anything can be published anywhere on a page, and that makes things much easier if you want to add something. Layout, graphics and colors can easily be changed at any time.
As a website solution it's ideal and it's the way to go. But the forum is the core and always will be. It remains to be seen how the membership will take to the front page changing, and to be honest I expect a storm of protest. I think that's why other forum sites have gone for other routes. But come back in six months and all that will be over and done with - and it's my job to plan for the future. Ecigs and ECF are here for the long term, in ten years' time we'll see the real state of play - today's issues are just a hiccup on that scale.
In ten or fifteen years time I fully expect ecigarettes to be a mainstream consumer product,
tobacco sales falling rapidly, and this site to be many times larger. We'll just have to wait and see...
