What's a good social media platform?

[Timmy]

I'm looking to start a local community website. I live in a small town, where everyone knows each other and stuff, I'm partnered with the city here in Clermont, Florida, and we're thinking about creating a city community website, as the population is growing, so are businesses, hopefully we'll even get a shopping mall soon! haha.

But to the point, they've asked me to put together a social website for the city. I've worked with quite a few blogs and forum boards, but none of them really tickle my fancy for this website.

I want the website to be a blog, so we can post upcoming events, post news stories, community plans, upcoming concert events in the area (Not too far from Orlando, we're in the dead center of Florida) close to the beaches as well (Just a 45 minute drive to either coast basically) so whenever there's events and such they can be advertised. But we really want this to be a community website, where we can get ideas on what things people like to do in the area, plan events, get feedback, see what other people would like to see on the site, what things they want to do around the town.

I don't want the site to be a Facebook-copy social site or anything though. A basic blog for the homepage, linked with a forum possibly.

I've used Wordpress before, love the ease of access, and the look and feel on both the user-end and admin-end, but I don't like the way it integrates with either PHPBB forums or SMF, nor do I like any of the built-in forum plugins like BuddyPress, just not enough features or anything.

I'm not too experienced with any other blog platforms, but I am a techie, so I catch on and get the hang of things easily. I've visited a few Drupal sites lately to check those out, but every single one I went to, you had to login before the home portal page or blog page would come up, I don't want the people to feel forced to register to check out the site, so if that's the way Drupal runs, that should be out the question. Though I've never used it personally, so I don't know what to expect.

Normally I'd just throw the script onto the site to play around, but I'd rather get personal feedback on other platforms and scripts instead of wasting time trying out other things, after all, I don't want the other city workers to thing I'm just farting around wasting time playing around with stuff.

So basically, a blog for the homepage, and some sort of social thing tied in, hopefully a blog platform that has forums built-in, or can be easily integrated with an external forum platform. Hell, social media plugins would be great (but not necessary at all) such as a "signup with Facebook/Twitter" thing or whatever so signups are easy, since we have a lot of old folks around the area that may want to check the site out (You know how everyone talks about moving to Florida when they retire? They come straight to Clermont!)

Thank you in advance to anyone who takes the time to read this, or share some input.
EDIT: Also, the only thing the city is paying for is the domain and hosting, so either something Free/Open Source, or cheap, since the design is all out of my pocket! (The government is cheap, who knew?)

[David]

Try Ultimatewb. It's the best one I have used.

[Robert]

Are you managing all your social media marketing efforts yourself? Are you your own social media manager? Yes, there is lot of learning and lot of fun in handling all your social media efforts. However, if you are handling your own social media marketing without adequate experience, you should be cautious about one of the important factors, which is to try all the new social media platforms and all the social media tools without any discretion.

[Hans]

Hi Jimmy,

Joomla + JomSocial can do what you want.

We have explained how to create a social website from scratch here: http://www.itoctopus.com/can-joomla-be-u...ng-website