Talk Back With Your Mac. Here’s How We Do It.

There’s something to be said for trying to do it yourself. First, there’s the satisfaction of getting it right. Your Mac, Mac OS X, and a few excellent applications can give you, your company, your organization, a VERY inexpenive content management system complete with a forum. And it’s VERY powerful.

How powerful, you say?

Size matters. If your Mac is the right Mac you can handle gazillions of users and have your own forum up and running in nothing flat. We did it. Click Here for a look at the brand new Mac360 Forums.

What’s a forum and content management system (CMS) get you? Your own web site. Your own company or organization’s bulletin board (hereafter known as a “forum”) to exchange messages, handle private mail, and provide information via a web browser. All on a simple Mac.

I’m going to tell you how. You can do it expensively (PowerMac G5, most expensive software), or you can do it for peanuts and pocket change (Mac mini, and FREE!).

Here’s how we did it on our PowerMac G5, even without the expense of Mac OS X Tiger Server ($500). Even a Mac mini comes with all you need to get started.

First, you’ll need a content management system. There’s plenty available. The two I’ll mention are Mambo (open source) and pMachine’s Expression Engine (used by Mac360, MacDailyNews, iPodLounge, and many other Mac sites).

Your Mac and OS X need a couple of applications to make it go. The first is PHP (a scripting language that Mambo and Expression Engine use), and the second is MySQL (a free and powerful database for Mac OS X).

Click Here to download Marc Liyanage’s version of PHP 4.3.x for Mac OS X. It’s a simple double-click install and you won’t have to do anything else. Really.

Click Here to download the Mac OS X version of MySQL 4.1.x. It’s free and a simple double-click to install.

You’ll need something to set up the database and I recommend either CocoaMySQL (free), Navicat (not free, but nothing’s better), or phpAdmin (free). All are available at MacUpdate for download. It’s easy.

Almost the same thing holds true for Expression Engine and Mambo.

Click Here to take a look at the highly recommended Expression Engine by pMachine. There’s a charge for the application and the forums. They work great on Mac OS X. Even a mini. Even and old, old iMac.

Click Here to look at Mambo. It’s open source and as low priced as you can get. It’s not as powerful or flexible as Expression Engine and doesn’t have a built-in Forum Module, but it looks nice and it’s easy to setup and navigate.

Both the CMS applications are scripts written in PHP. All that’s necessary is to follow the instructions for installation into your web site home directory. On Mac OS X that’s /Library/WebServer/Documents/.  That’s where you’ll put the Expression Engine or Mambo files.

From there, simply follow the instructions to install.

What will you get? With a little work, you can have a site like Mac360. Forums are an easy setup, too. Obviously, I’m recommending pMachine’s Expression Engine Forum Module, but others are excellent (though they won’t integrate with EE or Mambo). These include the powerful vBulletin, the popular Invision Power Board. Both are a bit expensive but very powerful and work great on Mac OS X Tiger (and Panther).

If you’re on a tight budget, there’s always the free and open source, phpBB.

With the correct clicks you can have a forum up and running in less than an hour. Really.

In the meantime, check out theMac360 Forums. Got a question? Check out Bambi’s Technical Support Forum on Mac360.

Have we left anything out? Hmmmm. Well, you’ll need to point and click and make your Mac and OS X do some work. Share your experience with others on the Forums (hint—one of the first 500 posters will win an iPod—details to come).