Building a Community Around your Blog

Your WordPress site is a community, even if it’s not a powerful one yet. Are you doing everything you can to make in an interactive space for your users? Are the comments sections of your posts enough for them to express themselves? In this talk you will learn how easy it is to add forum plugins and widgets to your site, integrate SSO (single-sign-on) and take advantage of popular APIs to turn your blog into a real hub of interaction for your visitors.

Brendan will illustrate the benefits of adding a community forum to your WordPress site by looking at real world examples of high traffic WordPress communities and the features and tools they use. The Vanilla forum software and its integration with WordPress will be demoed in detail, but this talk also applies to other forum solutions.

This is starting at intermediate level. For anyone who can wrangle a single blog and wants to know where to go from there, this should be right up their alley.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Brendan

Brendan has been an interactive designer, developer, author and teacher for over 10 years. He has taught web design at Long Island University Brooklyn campus, and was a professor at Seneca College in the School of Communication Arts for over seven years. Brendan has contributed to many open source projects including papervision3D, red5, Firefox, WordPress, and Drupal. Follow @vanilla on Twitter.