Specialized CMS Systems - Forum or Bulletin Board Software

As more and more people have started to go online, a new era of socializing on the net has begun. The communication aspect of the web is one of the most important and is widely used by people as a cheap and quick way of connecting to their families, pals and even for finding new friends and like thinkers online. The idea of a “Global Village” is slowly coming alive. And it’s only human, for people, to form communities with other people who think alike. Discussing over topics, communicating and sharing knowledge are some of the key things that people do in communities. While this is very easy to do in real life, on the web you need some specialized tools for that. The idea of a community or forum fits perfectly in the philosophy of a Content Management System since ongoing, parallel and cluttered content will be generated by people in such a concept and a CMS can do the job of organizing this clutter very well. So the idea of a specialized type of CMS system materialized very soon and today, we have many software are available for us to create online forums. The options include some paid as well as free software.

For using a Forum CMS also known as Bulletin Boards, one need to have a server of his own or at least own some space on a commercial web server. Some of the popular choices available include some free software like PHPBB which is written in PHP and comes under GNU General Public License as well as some excellent paid options like vBulletin which is also PHP based but comes with paid technical support.

A Forum CMS or Bulletin board provides the concept of User Accounts to its users at its very core. Users fill a simple form to register on the forum and become member of it. Mostly forum communities are based on a basic theme out of which the community forms. The administrator of the forum can divide the forum into sub-forums and so on. When a user wants to discuss a new issue, he/she creates a “Thread” where other users can also come and post their views. Most forums also permit use of multimedia content and HTML in the posts apart from text and also let users to "attach" file to their posts much like they do with their e-mail.  Some users, on sole consideration of the administrators are made moderators of the forum to help him with administration of the forum.

So in this way, forums provide excellent opportunity for people to go online and share their thoughts, views and knowledge with the rest of the world and make new friends in the process.