Which forum?

[gaj]

There seems to be so many forums out there but I'd like to know what people look for when choosing one.

I'm considering phpbb, mybb and vbulletin at the moment but I've also seen a few like vbadvanced.

What do I need to consider?

Carl, vbulletin seems to be my preference at the moment but whats your experience with it? Is it easy to back up, maintain. I'm looking to integrate it with Wordpress seen afew hacks out there.

[Piercy]

There seems to be so many forums out there but I'd like to know what people look for when choosing one.

I'm considering phpbb, mybb and vbulletin at the moment but I've also seen a few like vbadvanced.

What do I need to consider?

Carl, vbulletin seems to be my preference at the moment but whats your experience with it? Is it easy to back up, maintain. I'm looking to integrate it with Wordpress seen afew hacks out there.

are you just looking at php scripts? My preferance is the WebWiz Forum but it is written in asp.

Works out the box and has all the features of the other forums I have seen:


unlimted forums
full admin panel
skinnable
plus extras like a bad word filter, file upload (choice of comms) and a full set of avatars.

[Carl Shepherdson]

I prefer Invision over vBulletin, I am considering switching the forum back to it.

vBulletin is "ok" the admin interface is quite complicated and it has simple features missing that it should really have.

[sladmin]

I don't see what wrong wiv phpbb to be honest, its free and easy to install! And there are millions of skins available. Although the only downside is that it does not support sub forums which is a shame :sad:

[toddy]

Im sure PHPBB 3 (still in beta I think) does

[sladmin]

:eek: Ooooooooo You're right as well toddy!! Just read the feature list for the 'Olympus' beta release. I didn't realise that when I installed it a while ago. Might re-install and take another look....

[agric]

Hi Piercy

Do you have a link to the Webbiz forum software? Is it free to use?

Thanks

Agric
http://www.agric.co.uk

[Piercy]

Hi Piercy

Do you have a link to the Webbiz forum software? Is it free to use?

Thanks

Agric
http://www.agric.co.uk


Here you go

Webwiz (http://www.webwizguide.info/)

Yes it is free along with a whole host of other asp apllications/guides

[AlphOmega]

Ive got a job coming up next month. It includes the use of a forum. Seeing as we don't have one in our portfolio I decided to create a demo forum to satisfy the client.

I had a look a mybb and installed it. After about 5 minutes it was clear creating a template was going to be hassle.

It could be better but the phpbb templating system is just soooo easy!!

take a look
http://fedora-forum.digitalsphere.co.uk/index.php

[sladmin]

I have to say that is a great design. Love the blue smoky circles at the top. Did you create those?

[AlphOmega]

No I didn't create them, I wish I was that good. That graphic was taken from the installation screen from Fedora Core 6. I however, had to get permission from the Fedora Artwork Community to use it. The nice people sent me all the OS psd's and xcf image files!

Im just so suprised how easy it is to template phpbb. This forum took me 4 hours in total. I however cheated and based it on the default silver template.

[sladmin]

Well I think all the templates on the PHPBB site are based on the SubSilver template. Why bother messing around with all the layout and php includes? Anyway looks like a nice forum nice work ;)

[AlphOmega]

One thing I use a lot of on Forums is the live bookmark. If a forum does not have this i wont join. Its kind of an important feature for me. When choosing what forum to use for the client the choice for us was limiting. It had to be open source. This is one reason why we use joomla for cms as we are totally able to rip it to peices if we need to. So this put Invision and vbulitin off the list.

Mybb has an rss feed but after installing it it seemed that it was dreadful in terms of templating. The developers must be having a laugh!

Anyway ill get to the point. I thought phpbb would be best and i was about to create my own xml rss feed for it as it would be quicker than templating mybb but then I found this.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpbb-rss/

Might come in useful for someone else on here.

[gaj]

Cheers Guys,

Im going to continue bulding up users on my site and will keep playing with different forums in the meantime.

AlphOmega - thats one slick design.