From Wordpress to Joomla to IP.Content

For those that know me I am not a programmer. I do have some basic understandings and can by, but I would probably consider myself more of a modder. I know enough to be dangerous but not necessarily enough to do that good. LOL!

When IP.Content first came out I was really excited. I was struggling with getting a Forum community into something a bit more. There were many aspects of multiple communities that I administer from IP.Board, Wordpress (blogs), Wordpress-Mu (blogging community), to Joomla. The biggest problem is that none of them integrate... easily. For awhile I would get them bridged and they would run but when updates came out, it was a pain to update and correct. Sometimes it could take weeks to months before updates were created to make the bridges compatible again. It seemed the search to integrate everything was closing as I started to find different solutions.

Wordpress was nice since most of the communities centered around news, reporting and articles. Wordpress was designed for that although they had an annoying template system that I wasn't too much of a fan of. Wordpress worked great for multiple authors and reporters to create articles and display them in a nice format, better than a standard forum post. The issue though was comment system didn't really provide a platform for constructive conversations. It needed a forum to build the community more. Unfortunately they don't have any decent forum plug-ins or maybe I have just been spoiled from using IP.Board.

Then Converge came with a bridge for members. This was going to be the answer to everything I needed. I could already skin Wordpress to match my website. I have learned how to skin IP.Board to match my website. Now I could get rid of the annoying hassle of having to log in twice. The basics behind it worked great. Unfortunately that is where it stopped. I waited months for enhancements to come to it but they never did. They started working on bridging more software, instead of focusing on what they had first and eventually the people working on that projects went on to other projects. Back to Wordpress and Joomla.

Then Nexus. This would do everything I needed. That project has been basically on hold, at least that is what it feels like to me. I keep hearing about it but as a product it is pretty much non-existent. After waiting months I decided to move on.

Then IP.Content. Not as nice as the Nexus was when I beta tested it. However it had the potential to be really big. I implemented it in one community for articles. It was a hassle to learn at first. But at least skinning I was familiar with doing. That is always the bad thing about switching to new products having to re-learn how they skin/theme differently than others. With this however I was able to fairly easy achieve what was needed for a client with IP.Wrapper.

However I needed more. IP.Content at the time was not able to provide it. So I went back to Wordpress for Articles and Blogs. Ok... now I'm back again. Now IP.Content at least has a basic article system installed with it. It has a sample template and demo which explains some very simple set ups.

After doing some initial testing, it looks like I might be able to get this to work for what I need. I will be working with it and slowly modifying it to meet my needs. As I am doing this, I figured I will do a Blog from start to finish with working with it. Maybe others will find it useful, since I believe IP.Content is one of the most under-estimated modules. Sure I wish it did more, however when IP.Board first came out we all wished it did more and look at it now. I would still like Nexus but for now this looks like I might be able to actually complete some long awaited projects.