Brian Teeman

About Brian Teeman

Originally a youth worker with severely disturbed youngsters Brian was involved in publishing some of the largest multimedia CD-ROMS of the late 90's. In 2000 Brian helped to launch the first Linux ISP for the UK and later co-founded Joomla! and Open Source Matters.

Brian writes regularly on all things Joomla! at http://brian.teeman.net and is never known for being slow to express an opinion.

Do I Really Need A Forum? Building A Community Online

Creating a web site for an online community is easy to do with Joomla! but that is not the same thing as building an online community.

In this session, we will look at the tools you need to build a successful online community and none of them require PHP, MySQL, HTML or CSS knowledge. Using the example of several Joomla! web sites we shall see that it's not quite as easy as adding a forum or Facebook clone.

Building a successful online community is much more than that. If you do it wrong, you can kill your community before it even gets started.

This session is designed to challenge your ideas and pre-conceptions. It may not give you the answers, but you will take away a lot of questions and issues to consider. Brian has presented at events across the world and his presentations are not the normal dry PowerPoint slide full of long words.

A translator will be on hand just in case anyone has difficulties with his English accent.

Presentation Link

Field of Dreams (slidecast)