Best software for running a small book-anchored online community?

by philg

Folks:

I’m assuming that ArsDigita Community System (old book chapter; current version) cannot, nearly 20 years after its inception, be the right software for running a small online community anchored by a book. But that raises the question of what is the best software in a world where one can’t expect anyone to truly join any community other than Facebook.

Here are some things that the site needs to do:

  • let people read chapters
  • into the text of each chapter add the following:
    • link to Amazon so that they buy a Kindle version
    • Google Ads
    • widgets for readers to promote the page to standard places (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon, what else?)
    • tags for Google Analytics
  • question-and-answer forum with newer messages displayed in reverse chronological order and older ones categorizable in two orthogonal dimensions (so there are two dimensions for categorization but the categories in one dimension are not subcategories of the other)
  • a blog for news articles about misc. topics (but maybe the blog should actually be the Q&A forum? Just let anyone post a new topic but require approval before a topic/question goes live?); this too needs to be categorized in two dimensions
  • users registering for email alerts of new discussion forum postings, new blog entries
  • ability to log in with Facebook credentials and other credentials (just to get the person’s name and email, not to go poking around among their friends or do anything else invasive)

I think this is basically the feature set of WordPress but I’ve never quite figured out how to make WordPress do the boring static web site stuff. Drupal also comes to mind but it seems like overkill if all that we need is a single blog and a Q&A forum plus some fundamentally static web pages.

What’s the community wisdom?

Thanks in advance for sharing your expertise.

7 thoughts on “Best software for running a small book-anchored online community?”

  3. Many choices: vBulletin, phpBB, Vanilla Forums, Discourse.

    The authors of WordPress have something called bbPress, but given how bloated and inefficient WP has become, I am not sure I would advocate for it (not to mention having to deal with PHP, but most forum software seems to be written in it).

    I’m surprised there aren’t any good Python, Node.js or Go options available. Forum software seems to be like blog systems or calendar apps, the new Hello, World of webapps.

    The single biggest challenge you will face is not setting it up or customizing it, but rather the soul-sapping grind of moderating trolls and spammers.

  4. but I’ve never quite figured out how to make WordPress do the boring static web site stuff

    I’m confused. Where are you having difficulty getting WordPress to do the boring static website stuff? I’ve found that to be one of the easier parts to work out.

  5. pdwalker: I haven’t played around too much with the non-stock WordPress themes, but from what I know about WordPress it seems to have a strong “deal with one page at a time from an admin interface” bias. And it is one blog at a time. I was just poking around a little and found https://buddypress.org/ which seems to take WordPress a little more into the online community realm.

  7. Hi,

    in theory drupal was made for this use case. However I could never get used to the workflows in drupal.
    ning.com is a commercial hosted community service which might fit your needs.
    If you want to host yourself and open source I’d recommend wordpress / buddypress. It’s easy to use and updated automagically (at least the core), in contrast to drupal (where you must be vigilant yourself, as shown in the last security breaches).

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