As I get closer and closer to launching my personal website I am looking for the final puzzle piece to link everything together. What I would like to accomplish is a posting board that sends “new message has been posted, click here <url.link>” each time when I post a new message. This posting board is not necessary open to the public, as it is intended to submit new articles only by internal site managers. I would like this posting board to have online submit form or, if possible, receiving it via email and posting automatically. The posting board would only have less than 8 categories. And of course, the site visitors can access them without issues, which are grouped neatly by said categories.

So, my question is blog or forum? As I gather, forum is great for multiple topics. I also understand that I can set the forum so that when a new posting appears, it can send alert messages to the group list. But what about a blog? Blog seems to be easier to maintain. But can it send alerts via email? Can I have 8 different blogs where each blog is dedicated to a topic?

And this leads me to the ultimate question: can I send my news as an email and have it post to my board, somehow, automatically? This feature is not a must, but it sure would be nice! When there is more than one category, can anything out there (blog or forum) distinguish which message should go where? Or again, can I have more than one blog at my site? I guess I am looking for full automated posting board. If not, and possibly does not exist, manual cut and paste isn’t so bad.

An idea I just had...if I set 8 emails with, i.e. mail1@site.com posts to board_category_1, mail2@site.com posts to board_category_2, etc.? Could this work?

If you have the money, a forum would of course be way better... Not only your visitor can talk to you in the forum, the visitor can also have access to other features of the forum like lets say you are operating IPB, the visitor or member can play the adds-on Arcade, RPG Inferno, Army System, and other RPG games. The user will register and leave down their information which you can include them in your mailing list.

Having Invision Power Board, you can use their official script that have gallery, which save you the time to set them up right from scratch and they even have a Blog system, which is like killer 2 birds with 1 stones! So why not having a forum which have greater features and EVEN the features of a blog...



You can have more than 1 blog at your site if you have IPB as your forum, and you could easily go to your administrator cp => Bulk Email and then sent the email you want to all your member, then copy and paste the email you've sent and post it at your respective forum category, it doesnt takes up much time.

Finally, can you elaborate about what do you mean by a 'fully automated posting board'?

Answer to both is yes. Of the ones I've used both Wordpress & Typepad have the facility to do both. Rather than having 8 different blogs, you can split the one blog up into categories.

WordPress have this option.
It also has to option to make ur user register.

I think thats what looking for. Sending e-mails to users...if some body know abt any script for that let me also know

I think you're looking for subscriptions scripts?

Blogs have this great feature - RSS. Syndicated feeds. I think Trap17 board has this too if I'm not wrong.

What it does is send the updates to a format where newsreaders/feedburners can read and notify users subscribed via the feedburner.

You can also set up your blog to ping sites that output a list of latest updated blogs.

Of course, you can do this with forums too, but it's a lot more complicated. The advantage is that users can discuss at your site itself.

Wordpress has the email feature as stated above.
I strongly recommend Wordpress. As Blogs go its one of best i say. It takes more effort to set up than stuff like "blogger" and Live journal, as you have to set up database in ya control panel, but ova from that its easy tos et up and completely customizeable.

Instant publishing with no rebuilding
Integrated blogrolling features
Password-protected posts
Dead simple upgrades and installation
Multiple authors
Multiple categories
Post to future
Post by email
Free!

for a full list of features and stuff : CLICK HERE

My blog uses it, but at the moment my accoutn has been suspended, due to me being away and having too much to do

yes... i suggest wordpress too...

it's open source, so many people develop plug-in and theme to WP...
and u can choose what u like...

first of all, i recommend blog.
no, i would not even give a try to wordpress because there are too many web site swtiched to cutenews from wordpress. as far as i concend there is a approve plug in for cutenews, there are 4 levels in cutenews. the top level is administrator then editor then journalist and commenter. all the posts had to be approve by an adminstrator before it display in the public page, which does the job you asking for. oh the mailling system, although i have never use this but there is a mailling function in your cpanel.

my littol suggestions...
if we(as a webmaster) need to write more and just wanna get back short reviews or comments, suggest blog which feacturing more about instructional, journalling, etc..
if we have a community like(some people involving), suggest forum which feacturing more about discussion, rapidly comments/reply.

suggestion(1)
if you wanna both feature combination(blog+forum+portal), dont mind to use phpBB
then use phpBB forum with mx-system. mx-system have a module called knowledge base DB which you can find on mx-system site.. that module is more likely you can give instructional, hints, faq, review, etc(have demo on their site). and also check out their forum about integrating blog system with mx-system(still under development)...so, phpbb + mx-system + knowledge base db module might need about ~8MB host space if i'm not wrong and of course one mysql db. (nearly 70% of your need)

suggestion(2)
yap wordpress is nice and another chance for this combination(blog+forum) is use wordpress with bbPress but bbPress is still under beta/un-release version. the output demo site look like what the wordpress site does.. it's nice and work, i've tried before, too. (nearly 90% of your need)

suggestion(3)
another good choice is using content management system probably CMSimple with your choice of forum. check the also CMSimple templete about the color theme with your forum(e.g.. CMSimple ipb skin+ipb forum) but this choice no.3 will be more off about what you wanted to do, i think. (nearly 50% of your need)

correct me if i said wrong,

this is an intresting fourm alright! but its cool too!