I came across this article by Dion Hinchcliffe of Zdnet.com where he discusses online communities and rates the top ten community platforms. Joomla was rated no. 1 in his list as a platform for communities with Drupal at no. 2 position. Also I particularly liked his model of the life cycle of an online community member.
Having used both Joomla and Drupal for various projects, I have always found Drupal’s core user management to be better than Joomla’s. There are, however, community extensions to Joomla which dramatically improve it’s use for communities particularly Community Builder.
I admit that I do not develop community websites, except perhaps in one case by accident. In that case, I got fed up of emails asking about dating contacts and set up a simple dating script in association with the website. This has now become a significant part of that website.
Dion contends that “Learning how to design an effective community, whether it’s on-the-fly for a small, ad hoc team effort on an upcoming project or a large-scale, long-term customer community of millions of users, is something we’re all going have to get better at in coming years.” It is certainly a skill I feel I need to learn sooner or later but honestly I tremble at the thought of having to deal with spam, upset members and all the other headaches of communities. I deliberately avoided these by not setting up message boards in the past.
It was quite interesting to learn about platforms I hadn’t heard of and now I feel I will have to try them out.
Here is Dion’s article:
Ten leading platforms for creating online communities.
