Hi everyone. I'm a community manager and I recently joined a company that uses Umbraco to power its community. It's got a lot of problems and I'm not sure if it's because of the developers or because Umbraco's not really designed for communities the way platforms like vBulletin, Vanilla, Discourse, and Lithium are. I see that it's possible with Dialogue, nForum, and uForum (I mean, there's a pretty good looking forum right here), but I haven't seen any outstanding examples of brand communities running on these.
At this point, I'm trying to figure out a few things:
Are there any fantastic examples of communities powered by Umbraco?
Do I just need better developers? And am I basically looking at a bespoke project?
Am I better off moving the community to another platform?
Hoping you can help. I'll appreciate any insights.
This forum is of course based on Umbraco - However the generated content, like forum posts etc. are not stored in the Umbraco backoffice - These are handled in custom table structures. As far as I recall the topic categories are created in Umbraco as pages but all topcis and their replies are stored outside of Umbraco in other tables since that is not data that should be kept in Umbraco.
If you need to run a small forum then I guess a package like Dialogue does a good job but it's not build for very large scale projects I think - But I must admit that I have not tried this package myself so I don't know how it handles generated content - However nForum and uForum are outdated if you're using Umbraco 7, which I think is safe to assume you are. So perhaps it's worth spending some time exploring Dialogue doing a proof of concept to figure out whether or not it's something that is suitable for your scenario - But I have a feeling that it's storing data within Umbraco.
If you need specific forum software for large communities then Umbraco might not be the right answer for you - Then it may make sense to explore other systems that have been specifically designed for handling generated content and manage forums etc. - Perhaps it could make sense to integrate these with Umbraco somehow - perhaps it's better not to. It depends on your scenarios and what your developers have to say on the matter I think :)
I can't think of other forums than Our as a good example that Umbraco can be used for forum software - But as I mentioned it's not what it's build for at it's core - It will require a lot of custom development to have a forum up and running hence one of the "out of the box" solutions may be a better option. The benefit from doing custom is that you have the freedom to build whatever you fance and don't have to struggle with limitations that might be in an "out of the box" solution.
Forums powered by Umbraco
Hi everyone. I'm a community manager and I recently joined a company that uses Umbraco to power its community. It's got a lot of problems and I'm not sure if it's because of the developers or because Umbraco's not really designed for communities the way platforms like vBulletin, Vanilla, Discourse, and Lithium are. I see that it's possible with Dialogue, nForum, and uForum (I mean, there's a pretty good looking forum right here), but I haven't seen any outstanding examples of brand communities running on these.
At this point, I'm trying to figure out a few things:
Hoping you can help. I'll appreciate any insights.
Hi Petra and welcome to our :)
This forum is of course based on Umbraco - However the generated content, like forum posts etc. are not stored in the Umbraco backoffice - These are handled in custom table structures. As far as I recall the topic categories are created in Umbraco as pages but all topcis and their replies are stored outside of Umbraco in other tables since that is not data that should be kept in Umbraco.
If you need to run a small forum then I guess a package like Dialogue does a good job but it's not build for very large scale projects I think - But I must admit that I have not tried this package myself so I don't know how it handles generated content - However nForum and uForum are outdated if you're using Umbraco 7, which I think is safe to assume you are. So perhaps it's worth spending some time exploring Dialogue doing a proof of concept to figure out whether or not it's something that is suitable for your scenario - But I have a feeling that it's storing data within Umbraco.
If you need specific forum software for large communities then Umbraco might not be the right answer for you - Then it may make sense to explore other systems that have been specifically designed for handling generated content and manage forums etc. - Perhaps it could make sense to integrate these with Umbraco somehow - perhaps it's better not to. It depends on your scenarios and what your developers have to say on the matter I think :)
I can't think of other forums than Our as a good example that Umbraco can be used for forum software - But as I mentioned it's not what it's build for at it's core - It will require a lot of custom development to have a forum up and running hence one of the "out of the box" solutions may be a better option. The benefit from doing custom is that you have the freedom to build whatever you fance and don't have to struggle with limitations that might be in an "out of the box" solution.
That's just my 2 cents - Hope it's useful.
/Jan
is working on a reply...
This forum is in read-only mode while we transition to the new forum.
You can continue this topic on the new forum by tapping the "Continue discussion" link below.