What's the best platform for building a niche stackoverflow-type site?
November 17, 2010 3:10 AM   Subscribe

What's the best platform for building a niche stackoverflow-type site? In the running: Coordino, Shapado, OSQA

I'm thinking about building a stackoverflow-style question-and-answer site for a niche audience. This is a hobby project, so I want to keep costs low. If interest is great enough, then the site may eventually be ad-supported.

From my research, I've come across a few potential solutions that are in my price range. Coordino is self-hosted with a one-off cost. Shapado is a hosted solution; the $9/month looks like it would be fine for getting the site off the ground. OSQA is the open-source option.

Does anyone have any experience, good or bad, with any of these three platforms? Or is there another solution I'm missing?
posted by primer_dimer to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Also http://qhub.com
posted by MeatLightning at 6:17 AM on November 17, 2010


If you don't care about "owning" it, you can propose it to Area 51, which is the launchpad for new Q&A sites using StackExchange, which is the platform that StackOverflow is built on. What's nice is that the process you go through forces you to think about what will make your site successful.
posted by mkultra at 7:04 AM on November 17, 2010


There are lots of self-hosted options. That info is a year old, so I'd say anything that has survived until now is probably pretty OK.
posted by rhizome at 10:18 AM on November 17, 2010


Coordino is for sale, apparently.
posted by barake at 12:11 PM on November 17, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks for all the comments. I took a look at the Shapado git repository, and it seems to be running at a very healthy several dozen pushes per day, so I've gone with them.
posted by primer_dimer at 2:36 AM on November 18, 2010


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