Jared W. Smith: On The Internet(s)

About Jared -- all you ever wanted to know about Jared Smith, but were afraid to ask.

Jared In Print

Building Online Communities graphic

In the second half of 2005 I, along with Robert Douglass and Mike Little, co-authored Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, a three-part book that describes three different approaches to building an online community:

  • Drupal, a full-blown content management system that one could refer to as “the kitchen sink” of Web applications;
  • phpBB, one of the most popular free open-source bulletin board scripts;
  • and WordPress, the emerging leader in open source blog software (and the software that powers this very site). They’ve also got a sweet hosted service as well.

I contributed the phpBB portion, and I’m quite proud of it. We target beginners in our book, and I think we did an excellent job of being careful to make sure people understand best practices to getting going. Sure, you can get the documentation online — but having it in this format, pulled together with our experienced voices leading the way, gives great bang for the buck.

I’m a beneficiary of this book, too. I referred to it a lot when I was first getting started with WordPress…so there you go.

What are you waiting for? Buy it from Amazon today.