FORUMs in Community building

The use of a self-registration based community website is a relatively new thing for the webmasters of the world. For example, in the past, using static html pages, a typical "labor of love" webmaster was forced to create all of his/her content on a continuous basis, costing a great deal of time and effort if you wanted a current, clean and exciting web experience.

These days, there are any number of web based content management systems that allow a truly collaberative effort, saving the webmaster from the shackles of a highly labor intensive task to maintain his website.

In evaluating the use of a content management system, there is a distinct shift of priorities needed. For myself, if we are to be looking at moving the COGEL website across to a new platform, then there are a number of self-regulating features that I would consider to be of paramount importance, with self-registration being a key one - this in concept allows you the visitor to the site to create a new userid for access to the site. All that I have to do as the site maintainer is approve of the userid request.

Also, registered users can create pages of content on their own, comment on stories, blog, or static pages for that matter. This page you are reading is brought to you care of the Drupal Content Management System which is an open source product that I selected as a result of the research that I did on behalf of Cogel at the outset of this project to enhance the site experience at COGEL.ORG - I evaluated several open source products, reviewing functionality, and then extensively tested both Drupal and Mambo.