A Drupal Based Business Forum for Greater Sacramento
Posted by John Lockwood on August 23rd, 2008
A few weeks ago I approached SmyrnaVining.com’s Aaron Hofmann to write a post for ParticleWave in our sporadic series, What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy. Since then Aaron probably thinks I’ve died and gone to…well, wherever I deserve to go, since I’ve owed him an email for too long about it.
I really must get with him on that to get him over here to talk about his experience implementing what I think is one of the coolest local interest blogs I’ve seen. You see, what Aaron has done is to get a group of local businesses together to create a sort of ultimate closing gift from the donations of this local business community, which he promotes heavily on his blog. The result I think is a very successful combination of:
- A business referral network.
- A high value promotion for his own business.
- An excellent community resource for home shoppers and others interested in his area.
Variations on a Theme
I’ve been wanting to create either a Business Forum for Sacramento or a more general portal for some time now, and seeing what Aaron did ramped up my interest in that goal. Rather than add it to my existing Sacramento real estate site, however, I decided to go in a slightly different direction.
At first I looked at some of the forums and city guides of various kinds that are already out there in Sacramento. Many of the domain names I wanted were already taken, by web sites in various stages of growth and activity, so I finally decided on a slice of the Internet pie that I thought large enough geographically (Greater Sacramento) but narrow enough topically (Businesses). Part of the reason for this business emphasis is that the goal of the site is to network not only for the sake of my real estate business, but also to help spread the word about my web site development business and do some more local business in that area.
On the issue of “What the heck will it run on?” I looked at several alternatives. PhpBB is a very popular forum software, but any kind of wider support for blogging or content management is ad hoc at best. vBulletin comes with good credentials and an optional blogging module, but it’s not free, and given that I don’t always know how successful these projects will be and I’m the guy funding it with, I tend to like free (yes, I know, the money is trivial compared to the time spent, but there it is).
What the Heck is a Drupal?
What I finally settled on was Drupal, a general purpose, open source content management system. Drupal has the best built in integration for a web site with forums and a blog (or a blog per user, but I’m not sure I’m going there yet). It does a lot of things including user registration and the forums and putting content where you want it reasonably well. The theme interface is very clean compared to Wordpress, and it’s reasonable to do a custom theme in about three files total.
Of course, compared to Wordpress, any blogging platform is bound to look somewhat primitive. Setting up a Drupal 6 blog to use Live Writer to post takes a little more work, but it’s pretty much detailed here.
In any event, the result has just launched and is in a very early stage, but it’s running and looks somewhat credible: SacramentoBusinessForum.com.
As always, however, the real community web site devil is in this detail:
Just add users!
