Lussumo Forums

Phantasos

So as you may or may not know I'm in the process of founding an anime club at my university. There has been a whole lot of interest expressed so far so I'm feeling really good about the venture. Right now we're centered around a facebook group but this is far from an ideal solution. This weekend I'm going to get our own Wordpress blog setup for announcements and I'd like to create a message board system for better intra-club communication, which brings me to the topic at hand...
I really like this message board. First off it just looks great compared to most others out there but I also like the extensibility of it through add ons but I have a couple questions/concerns before I invest a whole lot of time in the installation/tweaking. First off, is it difficult to setup and administer? What extensions do you currently employ? What do you recommend I start with? This is actually my first venture into building a site from the ground up from nothing but a domain and a go daddy hosting but I am by far the most qualified of those involved so far so any advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.

Apreche

This forum is pretty easy to setup. All you need to do is create a table in a MySQL database, and add a user with permissions on that table. Then just follow the very simple directions that come with vanilla. As for extensions, we use a crapton of them. But I suggest you stick to the basics. Only add more extensions as your users demand. Think of it just like Firefox extensions. You want all the ones you use, but you should get rid of all the ones you don't. Also, the people in the Vanilla forums are awesome.

Also, installing web applications is a skill everone needs to learn. WordPress, Lussumo, PHPBB, mediawiki, vbulletin, squirrelmail, phpmyadmin, etc. all have very similar installation processes. If you plan on hosting any sort of website, you need to learn how to install webapps.

Phantasos

Yeah, this is the first time I've ever actually purchased real hosting and built a site from the ground up. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out after one afternoon of working on it. Wordpress is fully functional but could use some tweaking. The forums are also up, I just need to get them linked form the main page.
All in all it's been a good learning experience. Not near so intimidating as I was fearing. If anyone is interested in checking out my handywork you can find it at www.uianime.com

PS-What kind of preview do you use? The one I found works differently (read: poorly).

Apreche

Preview Post 2.1 by Sirnot. Every extension I've got comes from the directory at getvanilla.com

Phantasos

Hrm, I've got thing, it just pops up with this big watermark "Preview" whenever you try to preview soemthing. Now that I look at it more closely (and with a bit more sleep) I guess it wasn't as different as I remember. I was just offput by the giant warning, I guess.

Apreche

Make sure you read the directions that come with each extension. Most of them you can just put in the extension directory, but some require extra steps to install properly.

Phantasos

It took me a couple tries to figure out exaclty how the polls work but once I got that done it looks like everything is working just as I'd hoped. I did want to put the formatting buttons on there, but the release notes said that it was by no means finalized yet and I don't have a test installation put together yet so I'm not going to install that one until I get a chance to play with it a bit.

Phantasos

Two quick questions. Is there a way to link back to the referring page other than to embed it in the title? It just seems kind of kludgy to wedge a link to another page in the title on the one you're on. If anything I'd expect that link to go to the discussions page, not an outside link. Also is there a way to be emailed when a new user applies for membership? I installed the extension to put a notification front and center but that still requires logging into the forum page 1000 times a day to check for it.

Thanks for you help.