Lately I've been thinking that a lot of people don't realize just what a powerful tool forums can be for multimedia/web development and collaborative projects between multiple authors. We use forums normally as "chat boards" - and that's fine - but they are capable of much more impressive things. BBS software like this is in fact a kind of multimedia and multi author development tool rather like wikipedia (Wiki Software).

I've been using free online forums to develop my last couple of multimedia projects, and I've found the following advantages:

1. It's online so you can access it 24/7 from anywhere. You can do development work while you're on holiday if you want to.

2. It's multi author, so depending on your setup, authors can post, comment, edit, or copy-modify-and-repost ongoing work.

3. It's multimedia - particularly easy to include pictures and text formatting - font, size and color. Plus it includes hypertext linking.

4. It's portable. You can normally just cut and paste multimedia content and hypertext links to and from other editors or Word documents, blog editors etc.

5. It's organized in threads and searchable. I like to organize my material in threads for individual comic strips, which will include text, images, drawings, all stored in one thread so I know where to find them. And it's linkable: I can do a thread to store website material and link to another thread for website banners. This is essential for a big project otherwise you're continually looking for stuff.

6. It uses BBcode. Most of us have learned to use basic bbcode for things like including images or doing simple text formatting, or making links to urls.

7. It's actually written in native HTML code - and it can be edited in HTML. This board's software in particular translates all the bbcode into html before saving. If you know html you can write nice and precise code here.

I've found that these features make forums an ideal (and free!) tool for developing large multimedia projects. In particular they are extremely powerful when it comes to multi author web based development. When you've got a native html editor like this one here you can use them to prototype and build entire web sites right in the forum.

Take a look at this html code I developed elsewhere:

Home|Today's Comic|Archives|FAQ|Cast|Forum|Links|Contact Us

(The links don't actually work at the moment because the site is down, but when the site is up they can actually be used to navigate the http://alliswellcomic.com website).

This is a web prototype for a menu system for a multiple page website, and you could if you wished edit it, make changes and suggestions and then repost it right in the forum. And then test that it still works in the post.

Once you've finished testing the page, site, or code fragment in the development forum you can copy and paste it into another editor and publish it, or go to the html editor and copy and paste the code into a html file in a text editor, and publish it manually.

My point is that you can use forum software to build websites and multimedia projects as quickly and easily as you write bbs posts! And you can use them to set up online multi-author collaborative projects and organize massive amounts of multimedia material.

I'm still trying to come to terms with what this all means, and still learning to use forums to their greatet advantage. But it seems plain to me that a revolution has occured in multimedia development and nobody seems to have noticed.

Che