[Davis123987]

Hello, I am interested in starting a blog. I want to provide quality tutorials and help to people, not a bout programming but some other things I am good at. I want to have a forum in it. I am not worried about finding a web host, i can buy a domain and pay for hosting myself. I want to have a blog where some articles are free and some are paid for. I want people to be able to make an account, the account can be used for the forums and blog. But regular users wont be able to post things on the blog, only moderators. Il have a specific section on the forum for people to post articles if they want to, and if a moderator thinks it is good enough they can promote it to the front page, and it will be in the official articles. I want an option for users to pay a very small fee ($5 or so) and then they can view all of the content.
What is the best blogging platform or website platform that can do this VERY easily without me needing to write any code?

Thanks!

[Shane Hudson]

From the top of my head, I don't think any do this out of the box. I expect all blogging software has plugins though, I know Wordpress does. You can also fairly (with CSS) integrate some forum software into Wordpress very well. But I am sure most blogging software will be able to do both, it is personal preference.

[revolutionx]

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What is the best blogging platform or website platform that can do this VERY easily without me needing to write any code?

You will need to hack stuff together and write code most likely. Unless you outsource it of course

Though I would look into Wordpress (for the blog) and bbPress (for the forum). This integrates with the Wordpress db users table, so they only need to have one account and it bridges the two.

You will obviously need to look at user permissions, ie assigning Mods/Editors access to be able to post and edit Articles on the blog. I assume regular users will only be allowed to comment on articles?

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and if a moderator thinks it is good enough they can promote it to the front page

You would need an custom function written to enabled posts to be marked as Featured. Or alternatively it could just be a manual process, where a mod would copy that post and create a new Featured post in the Wordpress backend. Though it does depend on how you actually want this to work.

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I want an option for users to pay a very small fee ($5 or so) and then they can view all of the content.

Personally I wouldn't do this. But you can take a look at http://wp-member.com/ or some other similar Membership plugin. Though remember you would have to hack this together to make it work with Wordpress and the forum integration.

This post has been edited by revolutionx: 24 January 2012 - 06:56 AM

[collusion]

I use Wordpress because of it's massive collection of plugins, but there is a premium plugin that I bought which does what you want it to do. It's called MagicMembers and allows you to restrict some of the areas to paid member levels. It takes some tweaking, but luckily you don't have to touch the actual code for that. All of the tweaking is in the administration and plugin settings. As for why I use Wordpress, it's because I have used lots of other platforms out there and none have compared to ease of use and functionality. I also recommend self-hosting it because there are some horror stories about free blogging hosts shutting down blogs just because they get lots of traffic. It would be horrible to work that hard for traffic only to have it all deleted.

P.S., Wordpress also has a free plugin for SMF (Simple Machines) forum integration. When someone creates an account on one or the other, it creates the account on the other platform. Simple Machines also has a paid restriction area feature.

[annaharris]

I have read your requirement. I suggest you to install Wordpress blog in your site because you can get all the benefits and features which are suitable to your requirement as well as some great features are as follow.
» It is totally free.
» You can do everything: setup, upgrades, security, etc.
» You can get content backup automatically
» You can upload custom themes
» You can upload plug-ins
» Complete control to change code

[Grigan]

Do you intend to have ads in your blog?