[BajaGringo]

Thanks Bill.

When I made the decision to resurrect the TalkBaja.com forum, I had already decided I didn’t want to rush into uploading some php script which would have made us look like just another forum, adding to a long list of similar forums resembling a 1950’s tract housing project.

So I invested a few months time envisioning how I wanted this website to work as well as its appearance and spent some time putting together a long list of items that I separated into 3 categories and became my 3F list : Function, Format and Feel.

Believe it or not, in spite of hundreds of developers out there writing forum software code, 99.9% of their work seems to all look and work pretty much the same. There were a couple of exceptions with some hosted forum options like Discourse but I found their limitations quite stifling and kept looking. In fact I spent nearly a year test-driving forum software and none of them made the cut on my 3F list.

I was getting discouraged and by chance, stumbled across a piece of software that was designed for selling online teaching / courses – I loved a lot of the format and especially the feel but the core function was not at all what I was looking for.

But tucked away inside was a module for course work support forums that included all of the features I was interested in from the core software and I had the crazy idea to try and make it work for Talk Baja. I ended up basically turning the software upside down but in the end I was able to check off nearly every item on my 3F list and I am still working on trying to resolve the few important items I would like to see that remain outstanding. Actually they are all doable today but not without a lot of baggage in memory and speed.

It has been a LOT of work but I am quite happy with the progress so far.