WebHuddle / Vanilla / alternatives? and CakePHP?

decibel.places's picture

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

Over at the IT Contracting Network - a nascent community on ning

We're discussing having a "live chat" event, perhaps with WebHuddle (anybody got another suggestion?) I installed WebHuddle for a different project, I thought it was cool, but never used it for a live meeting.

Also someone at LinkedIn recommended Vanilla for a forum-type community, anybody have any feedback on that? I downloaded the package but haven't gotten around to install it.

While I'm inquiring, a recruiter/agency type asked me about CakePHP I got it installed on my xampp local server, now what? I do so much PHP handcoding, how does Cake work?

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I can answer your questions about Vanilla. We looked at it briefly when we were starting to consider moving away from vBulletin. It's a good lightweight forum solution. The interface is quite different from the traditional forum setup. It might work better for audiences that don't have a lot of experience with forums. Sometimes people who have used forums a lot have trouble getting used to a different interface - they expect everything to be the same as the standard vBullletin/phpBB type setup.

We also considered punBB, and I think there might have been another one we talked about but I can't remember what it was. We settled on Drupal because it could tie in well with our content site (A Padded Cell). You probably know enough about Drupal forums... I probably wouldn't use Drupal just for the forums but it's great for a more comprehensive community site that includes forums and anything else you can imagine Smiling

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