New Kent Wings Site

The website of the Kent region of GWOCB has been dormant or non-existent as long as I have had my Goldwing. I think this is a pretty poor show for one of the largest regions of the parent club. I took it on myself to set up a site for the club here.

It`s also in the blogroll at right. I am pretty happy with the site as it stands at the moment although it`s brand new and untested at the moment and could provide plenty of fun and games before I can feel confident it is actually robust against hackers and spammers etc.

As always, it`s content that is king but since it is a new site there is not a lot there at present. I really hope the members use it and that it also becomes attractive to visitors. The amount of effort I shall spend on it is not unnaturally related to this sort of statistic although I do appreciate that an investment of effort up front is needed.

Getting the site to it`s present state took more time than I envisaged. First I tried to select forum software. My first thought was to use phpbb which is so ubiquitous but then a search of comparison matrices led me to SMF via expensive stuff like VB and Expression Engine (EE). There seemed no clear advantage to using software one had to buy, a view confirmed when I spent a whole day trying to get to grips with EE and in the end only succeeding in duplicating what took about 30 seconds with some of the freeware forum stuff. SMF looked like a winner until I added the complication of wanting a portal for the forum, so that extra pages of stuff and a front door could be added. Finding a portal/front door combination that suits suddenly turns out to be the Holy Grail, Google kept saying as much so it must be true, right?

After flirtations with Tiny Portal and a couple of others I tried MKportal. This, it turned out, was now packaging forum software with it (AEF, some new Indian start-up). At first this looked ideal; set up was easy and it looked pretty and it had great skins/themes. Unfortunately, functionality was not great and things like a calendar turned out to be mere stubs waiting for some future development.

So, after a long couple of days, I finally settled on MKPortal and SMF as the best combo. I think both are really good, fairly mature pieces of work that provide both ease of set-up and power in use.

Let me know what you think!