lampcms vs Q2A

Question

LampCMS looks like a great Q&A platform but it appears it's only developed by one guy. I personally love some of the implementations he's made (reputation points for posting answers to social media and javascript rollover effects). However  I also like the plugins for Q2A.

What do you think are the key differences between the two platforms?

Answer 1

Q2A is written by one guy, too. I doubt anyone here has also used LampCMS but from looking at their features list they appear mostly the same as Q2A.

The big piece missing from LampCMS is extensions/plugins. It seems to have some kind of event hooks like Q2A but that's it.

Although I'm not a huge fan of Q2A's design, it is fairly clear and simple. LampCMS's looks pretty messy. Also, they claim to have more sign in options but only the Twitter and Facebook buttons do anything.

Answer 2

LampCMS probably has the same functionality, but on first glance it actually looks alot nicer than Q2A. I especially like their user pages (e.g. http://support.lampcms.com/users/12/snytkine). I've found it nearly impossible to customize Q2A's user/member pages. They look horrendous and design is ultimately important in building a Q2A community.

All in all, the main problem with both Q2A and LampCMS is that the developer community is tiny around these programs. So you are stuck waiting till the developer actually adds something. With Q2A it seems like there is one person, Noah, who writes plugins.

Q2A is a great piece of software. I just wish it had some better design and usability features added, and I hope some developers get involved, so that there more plugins for some necessary features.

Comments

yeh I really like some of the ajax additions too, however I'm looking at the plugin system in Q2A and it looks much better documented (if not designed) to say the least.

Answer 3

Before starting a q2a forum I also checked LampCMS (I liked the clear design and the speed).

I can give one advice: If you don't have a dedicated server, and if you don't have experience with MongoDB, use question2answer! LampCMS depends on both, q2a not. Which makes q2a the winner for porting, maintaining, and developing plugins (at least for me and a whole bunch of other developers).

Comments

Thanks. But, I would have no idea how to integrate these better editor plugins into Q2A. I am good at hacking existing code, but I'm really not a PHP programmer.

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@DisgruntledGoat: Could you provide TinyMCE as a q2a plugin?

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In addition to mongodb, lampcms also requires nginx. So be prepared to spend a lot of time building a dedicated server just to get it to run.

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The dedicated server thing you can get over pretty easily through using a bitnami EC2 cloud machine (Amazon Machine Image) it's quite simple once you get the hang of it.

Answer 4

I couldn't get any proper cloud support for Q2A  but lampCMS has proper platforms to support like jelastic , Ec2 and others-

http://blog.jelastic.com/2013/10/22/deploy-lampcms-cloud/

 

And that can be considered as a very big point in current market