Open source Forum software to look at?

Acoustic Interloper

Anyone, admins in particular,

Some of us where I teach http://www.kutztown.edu want to set up a Forum for some cross-department promotion and collaboration involving research that includes students. We have a few master's programs, but this is mostly about getting undergraduates participating in collaborative research projects.

Anybody care to recommend Forum and/or Wiki open source software I should look at? I think keeping it inside our firewall will avoid most spam issues. It would have to be straightforward for our understaffed IT org to support. Hopefully, they will give a few of us janitor permissions. This may be the forum software used here, or maybe you have other recommendations, based on experience.

Thanks!

blue hell · Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2013 12:07 pm Post subject:

At least have a look at http://www.pmwiki.org/

It is not SQL based, SQL is a nightmare for admins, almost all web attacks I see go for it, either directly, or through PHPMyAdmin. To get it to perform you need a DBA too, which is another nightmare Wink

PMWiki is not directly a forum, but it has some plugins available to make it more forum like. You'll most likely be on your own with it though, it's not a mainstream thing, unlike that Status Quo Language ...

PMWiki does not out of the box come with a nice system for handling many users, that will ned some work.

So ... it will need some work to set it up, maybe not what you are looking for ...

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2013 1:24 pm Post subject:

This looks promising, Jan. Some departments and faculty already maintain web pages. Some know how to manage web pages. It may be possible to grow that organically using this tool.

We may be able to delegate some of the admin to a student group. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks!

MusicMan11712 · Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2013 4:37 pm Post subject:

Do you only want it just for your university or do you want to reach out to other music programs at other schools (CEMP - Consortium of Electronic Music Programs)? Just wondering.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2013 9:46 pm Post subject:

Actually, Dr. Steve, this is not particularly about music. It's primarily about finding what other research with undergrads is happening across campus, with the potential for collaboration across departments.

For example, I am overlapping a senior-level course with another prof from Communications Design (primarily graphical design) this coming spring, so our students can collaborate. We are trying to find ways to encourage cross-department communication & collab.

I suppose it could branch beyond at some point, but for now just getting cross-department collabs stepped up would be nice.

MusicMan11712 · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 10:17 am Post subject:

Thanks for the clarification, Dale. It makes sense.