If you are seriously contemplating a venture(like Mouthshut) and don’t know where to start, this article is for you.
If have a strong interest, time and patience [the commodities, which on careful investment can always bring success, provided you marry them with obvious hard work], you are a potential candidate to start a venture on the likes of Suleka.com, Mouthshut.com etc. [If this sounds too ambitious, tone it down to something like a sister_mouthshut.com:)]
Before we proceed we will define what we want to do. Lets decide to start, nurture and promote a Internet based Community of like-minded individuals on a particular subject. Our potential visitors will be able to read, obtain(quality) information and news about the subject, as well as actively participate in the community by feedback and submitting their own articles. The community will have visitors of various ranking, a directory of websites pertaining to the subject, a calendar of events, and a member’s directory with profiles. Thus we can roughly divide the site into three basic parts: Content, Tools enabling the visitors to interact and management of users. Complex? Think otherwise.
Let’s consider these basics: Web design, usability apart, the most basic and significant part of any website is content! Content, content and content. Fresh and regularly updated, interesting and appealing Content is the secret of a successful site. Isn’t it obvious why news sites are the most regularly visited sites on the Internet?
Once you have content, the immediate thing we need is: To provide for visitor interaction. Gone are the days of static sites that do nothing else but disperse information. Visitors and surfers are now becoming more used to contributing their comments and viewpoints on the content presented. User interactions with websites have taken many forms. Bulletin boards and forum rely purely on visitor participation. Weblogs(or Blogs) thrive on visitor comments and discussions based on articles. Sites such as Mouthshut, Suleka, Slashdot, and Kuro5hin are a few examples of sites that rely mostly on user contribution where in the sites provide the tools, motivation and environment for visitors to contribute.(Isn’t it obvious why you like being here at MS?)
The next thing is administration of your visitors. User registration is one effective way of managing your visitors, where you can know who visits the site, when, why and what exactly for, so that you can customize content according to these statistics, visitor preference being the deciding factor.
To sum up, we need to provide for the following: Content, Interaction and User management. Since we can’t afford proprietary solutions, we will be looking at using one of many freely available ready-made solutions from the open source community for building a site of our dreams and ideas which we have broadly outlined above.
There are a number of Open Source tools available for immediate deployment. CMS or Content Management System is the key word of such solutions. Various CMSystems are implemented using languages such as PHP and Perl. PHP is more versatile and adaptable, especially for a new comer since it has a lighter learning curve.(You don’t need to learn any languages yet. and never perhaps)
I have been using a number of CMS’s, right from one of the earliest of PHP based CMS, known as Thatware of which phpnuke is a fork. phpNuke has given birth to its own spawn of forks, Postnuke and Xoops being well known. Other options include Scoop, the system that powers Kuro5hin, Slash that runs Slashdot, eZ publish, PHP Content Management System, phpWebSite, DCP-Portal, Mambo Open Source, Geeklog and many others. For ourselves, let’s choose Xoops.( http://www.xoops.org)
Read on and in a matter of hours you could be the webmaster of a wonderful site(provided you can think of an interesting subject and attract some visitors to participate: A community site for students of your college is a good idea to start with)
Firstly, you need a PHP enabled website along with a mySQL database. Right now, for experimentation, sign up an account with a free provider, say Multimania.fr(Its in French, but you will find your way around am sure: look for’Pages Perso’ and’votre site en 10 minutes!’ and there you are). Now that you have signed up and have a username, lets download the latest Xoops package from [ https://xoops.org/modules/mydownloads/visit.php?lid=153 ], fire up the FTP client and transfer the whole contents of the HTML folder inside the just downloaded zip file to your newly obtained site at multimania.(mind that all files except images should be transferred in ASCII mode, while images in binary mode). When done, you need to write down these details: Your username at Multimania: lets call it xxxxx. Now the user name for your mySQL database is xxxxx_fr and your mySQL database’s name is xxxxx_db and at last, the password for your mySQL database is same as the password you provided for your username. Hope I have been clear enough for you to follow.
Open the following page: https://membres.lycos.fr/xxxxx/install.php(substituting xxxxx for your username) and follow the instructions. This is the installer and it is easy to use. If it advises you to change permissions for files such as config.php and others, you can do it from your FTP client.(Remember 666 for files and 777 for folders will do the job: if in doubt about how to do this, consult’permissions’ in your FTP client’s help)The Installer will try and fill up all details it can find and you will have to fill in the rest: mySQL details using the information we have just above written down. The last step will be to create a super-administrator account. Nothing difficult, just think of a username/password and fill up the empty forms. Once completed, you will be taken to your brand new Portal/weblog/blog/virtual community/whatever you wish to call it. You can log in using the administrator account you had just created and access the administration menu on the left. Everything else can just be learnt by commonsense and a lot of patience. Play around, experiment and you will get to learn its usage. Once you have familiarized with Xoops, you can move on to adding modules and creating themes. If you need help, feel free to express it on the comments section here and I will try to walk you through.
Xoops has all the tools necessary to operate a community site. Before you take a plunge, I would advise that you visit various CMS powered sites like Slashdot.com, kuro5hin.org, https://xoops.org, etc, register with them and play around. I have purposefully left out the part of how to deal with the administration area in Xoops since I personally insist that you discover the goodies yourself. Its easier than you might expect- believe me. Start with’Customise your site’ section and the rest will be revealed unto thine wisdom naturally like a eaglet takes to the wind:) PLEASE REFER TO THE COMMENTS FOR MORE DETAILS ON FTP AND ADMINISTRATION!
Xoops is a little similar to MS. Yourself and me are registered users of MS. Once we log in, the system provides us with various options like prompting us to add reviews, rate reviews, etc. It displays our profiles on the left margin of reviews we have written, shows similar reviews, summarizes the ratings and who rated how, etc etc. Such similar behavior can be found with Xoops too. Therefore I don’t think you would be lost without any idea of what to do or expect Xoops to do and how to get it done from the administration area of Xoops. Keep experimenting and you will eventually find out. Give it a try and you will be pleasantly surprised.
Since I have written this article in one stretch, I think it might need a few tweaking to make it simpler and better understood. Comment back on the difficult parts and my job will be done easier.