I am working with someone to build a community site, where this person would be something of a guru. It will be built around a specific subject matter, with him as the personification of this subject. We are looking at including such things as a forum, multimedia downloads & special reports by drip feeds, photo directories, member blogs, banner ads, live chat, etc. I am looking for advice on the best, most efficient way to do all of this with as few, high quality plugins as possible. Any suggestions?
Hey jackgordon! In my own experience I've found that the best platform to do everything you're talking about is WordPress with the exception of the forums and I have my own theory about that. My theory is that unless you truly want a community where you're not personally that involved you don't need forums. As the guru, you can control the topics by what you post in WordPress and people can interact with you and each other through the comments. Its like setting up a forum where only you can start a new thread. BUT if you do want a forum then in my experience vBulletin is the top-of-the-line and aMember has a very good plugin to integrate with that. But in front of your forum on your home page, WordPress is much more than just a blogging tool. With the plethora of plugins available, both paid and free, these days you can make it do just about anything. You can add videos, documents, PDFs, photos, articles...the possibilities are endless and it's very simple to use and set up once you get use to it. There is definitely an art to it but I don't believe the learning curve is all that steep. It integrates nicely with aMember too. You pick a theme you like for WordPress and then you can nicely integrate the look-and-feel of your aMember pages by applying that theme to the aMember templates. Once you do that and you throw in the aMember widget you can get from MembershipAcademy.com you've got a seamless integration for your content and community. Now for my shameless plug: I have written a plugin called amProtect for WordPress that easily lets you protect content in WordPress using your aMember products. It is very simple and does not require any other plugins to work. As of right now it can protect an entire post or a portion of a post. I'm hoping to make it work with the incremental content plugin as soon as I can. Finally, if you are going to choose WordPress as your main vehicle to manage the content of your web site as I recommend, then you might want to look into Jeff Johnson's Traffic Getting Plugin. That plugin points you to a couple dozen other plugins that he and his experts have chosen and tuned to help you get your site the best possible advantage with search engines. It can be quite helpful. Once I find something I like I stick with it. I've built a number of these kind of sites for myself and for clients and I think it is a terrific way to go and I cannot recommend this method enough. Hope this helps! I'm sure there will be other recommendations for you to consider too.