Besides forums, what kinds of features and ideas would you like to see implemented in the SitePoint Community?

Chat room maybe.

I'm sure though when I first came here though there was so maybe this has already been tried.

I've mentioned this before, but I think a bookshelf system that allowed members to rate different books and whatnot (linked to amazon.com) would be both beneficial and profitable.

I agree with Aspen. I have picked up a lot of good books because people here had mentioned them and I found it in a thread, I am sure there are alot I missed that I might benifit from.

Let users submit books, and then let everyone review/ rate them. Plus the amazon link would benifit sitepoint.

Dan

I like the book idea as well.

In the same vein as the bookshelf (although perhaps not as profitable ) we could have our own link directory, with user submitted sites, descriptions, comments. SiteCritique.net has something like that I liked.

Following on from DevilBear, a link section for sites with good coding; ie. xhtml compliance, use of XML, accessability, tidy javascript that sort of thing. Places like Coolhomepages tend to focus more on the visual side of web design, which although important, is only half the battle. I know I would benifit from pickin apart a really well built site.

I'm not sure how many language references there are on SitePoint, but I think it would be a great idea to post a link to the reference "book" in each appropriate forum.

Example..in the ASP forum, you would be able to click on a VBScript or ASP reference.

Or maybe a general area containing all the references for easier access.

Just a thought...

This idea is inspired by the Introduction to the Site Point Crier. How about some sort of "New Technologies" list. Where you list the lates advancements (software and hardware) independent and freelancing web developers and designers should know about. In the list you should include links to resources on each new technology... Perhaps there could be a place where people can post about new technologies or rate them.

So far there are some great ideas in this thread!

How about:

RSS (XML) files on articles and forum posts to we can link directly to the latest on our websites (TIP feed is ok but...).

And for the flights of fancy...

An Online Job Market (more than just a forum - bidding etc.) - combine it with online project managment tools (so we can for teams / work in groups etc.), somekind of international payment system and a development environment. (and this could tie in with Sitepoints somehow)

Setting up online "funds" for which we can donate to litigate against companies that creat things like ScumWare - demonstrating is nice. Sueing is far better!

Oh and one other thing. In some of the forums (especially the PHP forum) most questions have already been answered. What would be great is if there was some way to turn them into some kind of knowledge base. How? No idea. Would require some serious lateral thinking in how to make it automatic. But where there's a will...

i like the idea of a knowledge base like HarryF suggested... of course, users can still search the forum for previous posts so maybe we could combine the forum with the knowledge base when searching...

plus a place for companies/people to post projects and for members to look thru... specifically, each project would have to list the skillsets required as well as a brief summary of the project... yes, i know the trading post and bazaar already has this but it'd be nice to have projects also posted on a separate section of the site where we can look thru quickly

And another one!

How about Sitepoint favorites - more an enhancment of "Tracking Topics" - you can put a thread in your "Favorites" which are stored with your account - would be good for old topics, especially if people can create their own favorites tree structure to categorises them.

And absolutely awesome would be if these could then be downloaded for importing into Netscape / IE.

I think the SitePoint community is definitely big enough now to support an IRC based chat service (please IRC, it's a much more mature and flexible technology than some proprietory web chat system). Either an individual server or (even better) a server linked into one of the small technical networks such as www.openprojects.org - linking it to the larger networks is probably a bad idea due to the "undesirable elements" you get on those servers...