Our new forum works a little differently than most other forums out there. Mainly it is speedy, simple, clean, and fun to use. Developed by some of the same people who worked on WordPress, the new Travel Guide for Your Finances forum runs on bbPress. One of the things that make this forum stand out from the rest is the way that it allows people to dynamically categorize their posts. The topic of this site is simultaneously broad and narrow. While we cover topics financial topics such as credit cards, international banks, and dynamic currency conversion — we also discuss VoIP, mail forwarding and computer technology. What ties it all together is the emphasis on managing financial accounts while traveling. Traditional forums, while I think they work great for a lot of topics, forced us to try to manipulate posts into narrow, rigid categories. Secondly many posts would fall into multiple categories, but could only be placed in one.

The new forum allows people to categorize their own posts by using keywords call ‘tags.’ Once you’ve written your post, just type a few words that you feel best categorize your post. These words will be added to the left sidebar in what is called a ‘tag cloud.’ The most commonly used words will be bigger than the less common words. If your writing about receiving credit card statements in England using a mail forwarding service, no problem. Great tags for the post would be England, mail and credit card. These words will be used to help automatically categorize your post for other visitors.

At the end of the day it’s more dynamic and flexible. It also give you more control over the site.

If this is all old hat for you — great! Happy posting!

Click here to see it in action…