After setting up Expression Engine for the Guild website (still a work in progress), I’ve come to like the Wiki and Forums modules enough that I’m transitioning all my other work to it. The guild was intended to be a business networking activity in the first place, so consolidating other community content to the same location makes sense to me.

Forum Changes

I have a somewhat inactive forum at http://davidseah.net/dsforums. It’s a private forum, requiring a registration application to join. It’s based on PunBB, which is a fine BBS in most respects but just never worked well for notifications. I like the EE forum module much better in this regard.

The new forum is now attached to the Guild forums in another section; the shortcut is https://davidseah.com/talk. Guests may now read everything, but registration is still required to post. I also no longer require the “backstory” submission. The old forum will remain private.

Wiki Changes

The Wiki at http://wiki.davidseah.com is based on DokuWiki, which at the time of installation was the least ugly Markdown-friendly implementation I could find. After some struggling with its CSS, I got it to look “almost right”, but the Markdown integration felt awkward to me. The Expression Engine Wiki was much easier to configure, looked pretty good out of the box, and with just a few CSS tweaks looked even better.

I’ve moved the content from the old wiki to the new one; you can access all the Printable CEO™ modification action here. Also, I’ve enabled file uploading, so people can submit their versions of various mashups directly.

You can reach the new wiki at https://davidseah.com/wiki. I ask that people cooperate in keeping things organized. You need to be registered to edit the Wiki and to upload files.

Future Changes

One reason I am moving to this system is that the user management is handled by a single system; I’m hoping that I can leverage this for future integration with things like the Online Emergent Task Timer. The plan is to try to write an EE-based web service that will handle the data loading and saving for this and future tools, tied in with existing user management. If it works, we’ll get built-in forums, wiki, and data management, plus photo management and simple e-commerce within a single solution that I actually like. That would be awesome!

If anyone out there has experience writing such a web service for use with Expression Engine (it basically needs to accept and restore data from a Flash application), I’d be very interested in hearing from you.

Thanks! Enjoy!