[FatTony]

We have a site currently running the Dragonfly CMS. I was wondering if it was possible to have Dragonfly be a standalone forum instead of an entire site?

I don't find the Dragonfly very user friendly on the backend or for the end-user experience (except for the forum). I still want to keep Dragonfly as my forum solution, but the rest of the site developed another way. I am a web developer and have very little experience with Dragonfly.

Thanks!

[layingback]

Then just don't use the rest of it. Make Forums your Home page module (Admin > General > Modules > select Make Home on Forums module) and be done with it. Have seen several sites built this way - in fact recommended it to several phpBB2 sites way back when BB2 was a little too susceptible to attack - and CPG/Dragonfly was as solid as a rock.

But you can also build the rest of the site - from the components and add-ons - in DF very, very easily, and have the fully the security, registration and protection of a fully debugged DF CMS, so I don't know why you would want to do it this way...

Oddly enough the Forums seems in general to come in for more criticism than any other Dragonfly module...

[FatTony]

I may try this. Thanks layingback.

Unfortunately the Dragonfly CMS doesn't really give me the creative license I need for my web design. I will have to explain how to use the CMS to someone else one day and it's not very easy to do with DF.

[FatTony]

The org's members really like the forum, but using DF as a website builder, for me, isn't the most...attractive option. I have the rest of the site developed with another CMS, but haven't made it our live site yet because I don't want to have to change the forum. I just need to get rid of everything else on there not forum related.

I may put the DF forum into a subfolder, i.e. '/forum/' and have the rest of the site be the other CMS. I just don't think the DF templates are very... attractive.

[layingback]

Well I can see your DF site now, which helps - but do you have an example non-DF site that shows how you want the site to look? Then I might be able to tell you if possible in DF.

You have Content which allows HTML already, but you can go "lower" than that if you wish. Download the Home module from here and take a look at it. It is very small. That is intended to place a splash page in Home, but it will show you how little "overhead" you need for a minimal DF page. Then you can do whatever you want with your own HTML/code generation/Dreamweaver or whatever.

I build all the non-specific pages (ie. other than Forum, Photo Gallery, Store, etc.) for my sites with Pro_News. But then I would . But you may want to consider using DF modules for all the basic stuff and then use you own code for the truly special parts.

I do appreciate your "I have to train others to maintain" comment. I build almost all my sites with that in mind from the outset. I've found that by keeping the Admin interface uniform (thru' Pro_News) I can train up an admin in a couple of hours - often less.

[layingback]

X-posted above.

DF Templates are rather 2/3-column, yes But you have reDesign already installed, which is all CSS, so you can make it do anything. No need to look DF like at all.

Depending on your choice of "other" CMS, you may be able to export the forum to it anyway - a search in forum may reveal a how to.

[FatTony]

Thanks. At work we have started using Concrete5 for some of our enterprise level CMS sites. We used to normally develop sites with the Dreamweaver Developer Toolkit for our CMS. It was quite time consuming for larger sites. We shopped around for other CMS to use and found the C5 really fit our needs. I have started implementing the NTMBA site into C5 and want to keep the DF forum as our forum as C5 doesn't really have a better forum option and don't really want to have to switch to phpBB (which has been a suggestion) if I don't have to.

I am very familiar with CSS, HTML, etc, but I understand the C5 implementation a little more than the DF and the admin backend is much easier to navigate and understand. Don't get me wrong, I like DF for some web solutions, but not really for what I need to do right now.

Here is a link to the C5 site.

www.ntmba.org/concrete5.3.3.1

[mc__]

FatTony that homepage looks okay to me, but I'd put that Member's pics and Imba news as side blocks for the homepage only to make the layout more even.

Just my initial impressions.