Reference material: in the forum or somewhere else?

Hi all.

I'm running the Education in the Philippines Forum, which is a forum on Philippine education. I would like to add a section on the site which would have details about different Philippine schools, since this seems to be a demand based on my logs.

I'm wondering what's the best way to proceed with this. Should I put it in a different section of the website, using a different CMS, or should I just create a thread for each school, and have some sticky thread where every thing else is linked?

Thank you for your opinions.

 

In general, I like to keep it on a separate CMS (if you have one to begin with). For example, here we have the blog, so we use WordPress pages for most of the static content rather than stickied and locked threads on the forum. Some examples are the About Us page, advertising, Contact Us, etc.

But your specific case is different since you don't already have a separate CMS.

Maybe a thread with a post for each school, where the first post in the thread is an index, alphabetically listing and linking the contents? Or maybe there is some sort of "directory" add-on for MyBB that would allow you and users to add schools to the database.

 

I'm thinking of using Wordpress to accomplish the task too. I'm just concerned that this will pull out some users from the forum - they might not realize that the page (if they land on it from Google) is actually part of a forum.

I've already started on that though; I've redirected EduPhil.org Forum to EduPhil.org Forum so that I could put different sections in their respective folders later on.

 

Than your navigation and layout will be faulty. Each article should have a link at the bottom that says "Discuss this in our community forums". All comments should be placed in the forums and the latest ones shown at the bottom of the page.

Your primary navigation in the header of the page should also clearly list the different sections of your website including the community/forum portion.

 

Sort of like what we have setup here. We make it easy for visitors to see and access the different parts of our website; Homepage (blog), Forums, Directory and Marketplace.

If the WordPress integration would have worked, we'd have it set up where blog entries are copied to the Blog forum here and replies made in the thread are displayed as the article's comments on the WordPress end. Since it didn't work properly, we just turned off the WP comments and put a link in the bottom of each post that leads to the Blog forum where all posts are copied using RSS.