Together with three colleagues I’m going to build a new platform for an online community (more on that soon!).
Up until now we’ve used whatever free online service we thought suited us best, but as a next step in our evolving cooperation we bought a domain and hosting service. So now we can choose between using online services or running community software on our own domain.
Ning serves us well so far, but there is this thing about Ning that I don’t like. It’s hard for me to put a finger on what it is that makes me doubtful about using Ning for this new community. It’s in the mix of things that they offer and how they designed it that makes me itch every now and then. In my experience, it is a platform that doesn’t scale really well when more people start posting blogs and forum posts to the platform. It gets messy rather quickly.
BUT
Ning offers a lot for free! I’ve been looking for an alternative and I must say I bump into even more limitations. I’ve been trying to use and implement Drupal several times in the past, but that is heavy duty work and still more CMS than providing a proper community layer.
I installed Wordpress Multi-User together with Buddypress. Promising, but some basic functionality that I’d like from the forum (buddypress uses bbPress), like displaying Youtube videos inside a post, seems to be impossible. I’ve installed and deleted numerous plugins to get it to work the way I want, but most plugins only work for the blogpost section, not the forum. To top it all, changing a theme inside WPMU and BuddyPress is not as easy than standard WP. Not something I’m looking forward to learn.
So… in the end I think Ning is still the better option. Unless you have a better suggestion 
3 Comments
My pet peeve with Ning (and I am a member of several Ning communities) is the lack of a notifier. Some communities have a lower priority in my mind so I forget them. Others are not my primary concern, but I am in a position where I really need to know what is happening there. And I forget to check! I know another webmaster in a Ning community that has the same feeling. If only you could get notifiers of activities. Maybe that is what adds to your itch?
I totally recognize the ‘forget the community exists’.
Agree with Karen – Ning doesn’t have a good connection to other tools. I cringe every time I receive an email notification from it where I have to follow a link to find out if it’s actually worth following. Given that most people still live in email that’s a bit challenge to overcome for a member engagement.