Bring Blogs and Forums Together - MT Forum Released
About a year and a half ago I wrote about a trend I'd noticed where the space between "blogs" and "forums" was diminishing.
The convergence of the two media (mediums?) was becoming more and more apparent as software developers leveraged technologies in blogs to use in forums and other social media software and vice versa.
Connecting a blog site (CMS) with a forum isn't a particularly novel idea.
In many cases it's simply a matter of hacking the user data together to form a "bridge" of some kind so that a "user" or "login" can work in both places. However integrating the two tightly is not something you see every day and definitely not something you'd expect from an "off the shelf" solution.
The advent of Movable Type 4 has meant that innovative and creative developers have been able to get "down and dirty" and come up with some truly elegant hacks and extensions to the core software.
Mark Carey, who I've mentioned here more than once in the past, has just released his MT Forum plugin.
You don't need to be a genius to guess what it does. However what makes his implementation so interesting is the level of integration. It's not simply a matter of hooking a vBulletin install up with a Movable Type system - the forum is actually part of Movable Type once the plugin is live.
Now that is cool!
You can read more about the plugin on his site and take it for a test drive
The convergence of the two media (mediums?) was becoming more and more apparent as software developers leveraged technologies in blogs to use in forums and other social media software and vice versa.
Connecting a blog site (CMS) with a forum isn't a particularly novel idea.
In many cases it's simply a matter of hacking the user data together to form a "bridge" of some kind so that a "user" or "login" can work in both places. However integrating the two tightly is not something you see every day and definitely not something you'd expect from an "off the shelf" solution.
The advent of Movable Type 4 has meant that innovative and creative developers have been able to get "down and dirty" and come up with some truly elegant hacks and extensions to the core software.
Mark Carey, who I've mentioned here more than once in the past, has just released his MT Forum plugin.
You don't need to be a genius to guess what it does. However what makes his implementation so interesting is the level of integration. It's not simply a matter of hooking a vBulletin install up with a Movable Type system - the forum is actually part of Movable Type once the plugin is live.
Now that is cool!
You can read more about the plugin on his site and take it for a test drive
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Sounds good, I've always kinda wanted something closer to a forum/blog combo...
I may try it on my old blog on Rice Rocket if i ever get around to it