@Wendel: im curious to what you think is better SimplePress or BBPress?
@swaymedia: At this point I have to say, neither, because they aren’t doing the one thing that will make monetizing a site possible – collecting important data about my audience that I can share with a potential advertiser.
We -must- have the ability to get a relevant piece of information about our audience that tells our potential advertisers something about the audience member’s buying habits. For my site, I need to know the occupation of my visitors so ads can be targeted based on that data point. I need a way to require that that bit of information be collected at registration.
Neither bbPress nor Simple:Press do that. And that’s absurd, because it’s THE only way to monetize a website through advertising. And it’s being ignored. Screwing around with fonts and colors is irrelevant in the face of this need. I really don’t understand it.
you can always start a new field for a user and call it “occupation” or something…
however what i want is a stable PM feature, a built in one so i dont have to go chasing around 3rd party plugin authors websites, and reading tons of crap on what the next mod is to secure the bloody loop whole.
bbPress is still better but i need to make a decision quick, the PM feature is lacking soo much idk if they’ve fixed the plugin yet.
Yeah, ‘occupation’ is already there at the registration screen, but I need it to be a required field, and I need it to be a dropdown list that I populate with a fixed set of choices. I suspect I’ll end up going with bbPress since it looks like the deep integration (when it actually works) will do the backend on the cookies that I’ll need. When I asked about this at Simple:Press they said they might add custom fields sometime, and even if they do I’ll have to write the cookies.
If you’re looking at monetizing, maybe you have the ability to pay a programmer to accomplish what you’re looking for? Everything you’re looking for is doable (except making bbPress work like a WordPress plugin), but it might not be on anyone else’s radar right now. That’s not to say it can’t be done or won’t be done, but your priorities might be different from those maintaining the software packages.
LOL, my thoughts exactly! Now I’m in contact with an outfit in India to see what it would take to code the site in Joomla!
What a rabbit hole this stuff can be!
