Posted by: admin in wordpress, integration, forum, bbpress on
Jan 20, 2009
There are several options for integrating a discussion forum into your wordpress blog.
bbpress:
Pros: The one to watch out for. Integrates closely with wordpress. Makers of wordpress are closely involved with the development of this software. Actively developed.
I've used the StudioPress wordpress theme, it's one of my favorites, and the best part is that it's free! It has an excellent color scheme, has a clean Web 2.0 look, overall, I just love it.
As with most other Wordpress blogs that I’ve installed, I added Headspace , XML Sitemap generator and many other useful Wordpress SEO plugins. I have written earlier about my Wordpress blog SEO techniques that have worked great so far - including achieving a page rank 3 within 20 days of site launch for one of my blogs.
Studiopress was awesome, except that it gave me one major problem. It wouldn't change the Home Page Title. The home page title defaults to the Site Name- Site Decription format. If you know anything at all about SEO, you’d know that that’s a serious no-no. You want your home page’s title to be keyword rich, to include synonyms and include terms closely related to your site that your visitors are searching for. Your home page title is arguably THE most important SEO factor for your website. Of course, bad content and a great title is not going to help a lot, I am assuming that the basics of a website (good content, fast load speed, clean look and feel) are met.
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/yahoo-store-as-an-seo-friendly-ecommerce-platform
Like many web developers and SEO's, I've always been on the lookout for the perfect Ecommerce platform. CRELoaded is literally LOADED with ecommerce functionality but does not integrate a CMS into it, an unbelievable deficiency in the Web 2.0 world where content is king. Joomla and Virtuemart looked promising but with Joomla sites, you end up spending a lot of time trying a gazillion plugins (components, modules, mambots) that you need to mix and match to make a great site. And then there comes the upgrade and you never know which ones are going to work and which ones will not. And then you also don't know which of your components are supported by the Joomla third party SEO products such as sh404sef or OpenSEF. These plugins are free but often don't support certain components. You need a good Joomla developer that takes the time to keep themselves abreast of the latest in the Joomla and Virtuemart world. Virtuemart is also sort of limited in some key functionality. For instance, it does not integrate an affiliate management feature (there are workarounds, but there you go, more plugins) and does not have recursive billing options built in. These are core features that several stores need.
So, as my hunt for the perfect Ecommerce software continued, I ran into this post, a recent August 2008 post - http://wordpresswebpro.com/seo-tips/yahoo-store-the-best-e-commerce-platform-for-seo/. I am working on a site that is built on Yahoo Store now and I am realizing why this guy is so excited about it. It is pretty good. I am still pretty new to it so I don't know enough about the pros and cons, but it does look promising based on what I've seen so far.
With all the speculation about Microsoft buying Yahoo and even talks about Yahoo not doing so well, I hope Yahoo keeps making it's Store offering better!
Posted by: admin in wordpress, integration, bbpress on
Oct 28, 2008
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/bbpress-review-wordpress-forum-integration
Wordpress bloggers often have the need to integrate a forum or a user discussion area in their websites. This is especially true for blogs for a commercial product (software/book/download), multiple-author blogs or blogs on topics that lend themselves to discussion among visitors. My blog at http://www.endlesswait.com is about legal immigration issues in the United States. Legal immigrants are a frustrated bunch, usually waiting in line for years (often more than a decade) to complete their immigration process. During this wait time, there are all sorts of information that they need to maintain their legal status and what not. They tend to discuss this with each other.
I am working on adding a forum to this site at http://endlesswait.com/forum. As of today, this forum has nothing in it. Just the plain bbpress install.
The installation process is pretty simple. It is documented well here but there are a couple of points where you could get confused. If you already have a wordpress blog and are adding the bbpress forum to the blog, then Step 2 in the installation sequence takes care of that. I managed to install my forum in about 20 minutes from start to finish. It should have taken even lesser time, if it weren't for some minor errors that got resolved by reading the documentation pretty easily.
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