UPDATE: What would the best community app be like?

Design Meltdown mentioned an appllication yesterday that was new to me. It’s called Community Server and seems to be heading in the direction that my original post stated.

Community Server is a content management system that allows you to combine blogs, forums, photo galleries, file sharing, Wikis, etc… What makes it different from Joomla and the other popular CMS apps is the way everything is integrated. It features a single login and the navigation and style stay consistent across the site.

Telligent is the name of the company behind the app and they have quite a few large clients using it: Xbox Forums, MSDN, The Hive, and BET.

Unlike Wordpress, Vanilla, and the other popular platforms, Community Server is built on ASP .NET, not php and mySQL. That alone might make it difficult for it to reach a larger audience.

A few of the sites Design Meltdown mentioned that use CS were quite nice. BlogMailr, FX Best Practices, and Channel 9, integrate a blog, forum, and other sections, somewhat seamlessly.

So why haven’t I spent the past several hours planning for YGG’s conversion? A few reasons.

1) It can get expensive. They offer a free version hosted at a subdomain on their server, but you can’t place any ads in the community or monetize it in any way, and quite a few of the features/add-ons are stripped out. To really do anything with it, you at least have to go with the standard version which is $300, plus $150 per year in maintenance fees. To use the single sign-in with the standard version, you have to buy a $300 add-on. The version above that, Professional, is $1500, plus $400 per year and includes the single sign-in feature.

2) It’s feels like a closed community for developers. The main reason many applications decide to go open-source is because it enables developers around the world to expand the application in ways the original creator may have never thought of. While there are a handful of contributions from Telligent and some of it’s users, there are thousands more expansions available for Wordpress, vBulletin, phpBB, etc…

3) As mentioned, it’s language is not customary. I’m not a developer, but all of the projects I’ve worked on and all of the developers I’ve worked with have been based in php and mySQL. Can you find an ASP .NET developer? Absolutely. But when you’ve invested the time and money in developing your site in php, it can be quite a pain in the ass to either convert it all or start from scratch again.

4) The forum section is a clone of vBulletin. Almost every single detail, no matter how customized, resembles vBulletin and displays the discussions in the exact same way. This is fine if you like vBulletin. But I think vBulletin is a step back in the development of community forums, at least the dream community that I originally wrote about.

Community Server seems to be on the right path in bettering what we refer to as online communities. Understandably, they’ve invested a lot of time and money into building CS, but unless they offer more with the free version I can’t see it ever coming anywhere near the size of Wordpress. Such growth may not be one of their goals, so it’s tough to say whether or not that’ll ever happen.

I recommend giving their free version a try, as I plan to when I have a bit of spare time. It’s nice to see some development in the world of communities, but like what Darius wrote about in his previous post, a story about two guys in a garage can make an idea enormous. Does a corporation with 60 developers have the same sort of traction? We’ll just have to wait and see.

You can watch a video demo of Community Server in use here.