Not sure where to ask this so figured I would start here.

I'm trying to find a way to have a single forum accessible from multiple sites. Some of those sites will be Wordpress sites and some of them will not.

The idea is to allow users of multiple sites to work together on a single forum rather than trying to make a single site the go-to-place for forum information.

Any recommendations on the best way to do this?

 

I'm not just looking to have links back to a forum that only on one site though. I want each site to have its own front end and freedom to put the forum where it suits them best.

Essentially a forum is a front end that feeds data to and from a database, so if I can host the database on site A, I'll be looking to have the front end appear on site A, site B etc so that no matter which site you go to you can interact with the forum from there.

If this is the case, then I'm looking for advice on platforms etc.

 

I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to do. Ultimately you're going to get a single forum software that's separate from the sites themselves, but linked to them. It's not that hard.

 

Essentially I want to give site owners the option to either just have a link back to a forum that takes visitors away from their site or to have a forum on their site that links back to a common set of content.

That way people can post a question on the forum from any member site and have it answered by visitors to any one of the other member sites.

It sounds like something that should/would be fairly simple to do but I wanted some feedback first as too many times in the past I've thought something would be simple and wasted days on it only to find out it couldn't be done.

So if its do-able, where do I start, is there one forum application or engine that is better suited to my need than another?

 

I've always used phpBB and it's worked well, but it requires a very competent administrator. Then you place a link on each website. This way all the sites are using the same forum system, so they're all seeing the same forums. If you do it that way, you might want to set it up so that each site is getting it's own forum skin, with ads customized for that site.

Say if you had MG, Toms Hardware and Dell Support for example. MG users would have a skin showing MG ads, Tom's users would have a skin showing Tom's ads, and Dell users would have Dell ads. It can be done, but it requires an exceptional skin maker.

 

That sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. Thanks for your help. I'll be back once I've looked into phpBB and no doubt will have more questions then. Thanks again.