I am the webmaster for a private hunting organization. Currently the site consists of an about, contact us, maps, weather, history, and member area. The members area is a modified phpbb2 board. I'm working on getting phpbb3 modded up to my needs for better control.

Each of our members sign up using their Last Name (space) Member Number. The board features an anonymous check box allowing members to post anonymously as often as they would like. The anonymous feature may have been a great feature at first but as the forum grew we found that the same people were posting more in the same thread using anonymous as a mask. Anonymous started to lose it's credibility, and in turn the site has become largely read only.

Recently I have come to realize that my design skills could use and upgrade. I was using a different template for each theme and they had different colors and columns. To me this was great at first because this was something revolutionary for the hunting club. Working on this project over time has made me come to realize that my style was tacky. I found a great new template and decided that I would modify the code to fit all of my pages. It looks 10x better.

Although we are working on this transition from phpbb2 to phpbb3 and changing the face of the site, we still have not solved the read only situation. We would like to get more traffic from the members, hear more about what they have to say.

Now what I have failed to mention is that the members of this club are in peril. The administration has the membership scared so bad that they are afraid to post their names and take credit for their opinions. If they were to voice their opinion they may face consequences. Communism right? Well my site is the revolution and 80 out of 250 genuine members have joined my site, and all members now know of it, but no one knows who the owner (me) is.

We figure now that since most of our traffic is read only, why not keep the forum for some topics but make the site into somewhat of a newspaper. I have noticed that many local news stations have a system of posting their stories with the ability for viewers to comment.

In research I have found that this is today's new blog style. Wordpress is what most call it. We are looking for something like this to have user submitted articles, letters, and dnr stories posted as these pages and allow users to comment or reply to that article. This would be our content change.

I dont know much about these style pages. I'm confused between .rss and wordpress. I'm not sure just by downloading one of these templates that that is all I have to do in order for the page to allow replys to work. I dont know if there is some system like this that works great but stores member usernames in a database so that we can monitor who is posting, gives us administrative tools for multiple users ect.

I'm looking for advice/guidance in this venture. I'm also hoping to do all of this for free or close to free due to the fact that the hunting club is not for profit, and I am merely a revolting member trying his best to make a difference for the majority.

Thanks to all who help!

Well, you could install a wordpress theme and get the members to make accounts. That would then give you the ability to grant them access to post articles on specific pages (Main, DNR, Big Catches Page, Family Fun, ect...)

Or you could look into another type of software that would do the same basic thing.

Originally Posted by Decaf

Well, you could install a wordpress theme and get the members to make accounts. That would then give you the ability to grant them access to post articles on specific pages (Main, DNR, Big Catches Page, Family Fun, ect...)

Or you could look into another type of software that would do the same basic thing.

Could you give me an example of the other types?

You may be able to find some luck with more advanced CMS alternatives such as Drupal, or Joomla.