Forums

Posted on Fri, 03 Aug 2007
 at 14:50:07

     I've been working a community web site and like most community web sites it required a forum. We narrowed the choice down to 3 different packages - Vanilla, phpBB 3 RC4 and IPB Free; all have their own pros and cons and I am going to go through the reasoning of why we chose what we did, and cast aside what we decided against.

     I'll begin with Vanilla. Vanilla uses PHP and MySQL which most servers have so the requirements weren't an issue in this case, however it has one major flaw which is the main reason we chose to go with another forum software - it's basic, which is a good thing for a simple forum where you don't need much flexibility or the ability to deny access to forums based on what groups a user is in, but that's exactly what was needed.

     I'm told by a friend of mine that there are add ons for this but that would mean yet more work and more configuring which is a bit unnecessary given that there are forums out there with this ability already in them.

     Next we tried the IPB Free forums. These are actually hosted for free by IPB Free (the forums themselves are powered by Invision Board) which gives the added bonus of saving bandwidth and web space, but also throws adverts into the mix. The forums themselves had everything we needed, however we decided to go with the new phpBB 3 forums for 2 reasons, namely that they are faster and also because we would have access to the database meaning that it would be possible to integrate them with the actual web site.

     The phpBB forum software was always a bit crumby in the past. In many ways it was quite limited and overly complex and it used old web design techniques (tables) as standard, and so they were also quite slow. This is all changed with the latest version.

     The default theme is a thing of beauty - all CSS based, fast, easy to use (unless you're colour blind in which case it's quite the opposite) and it is also very powerful. In comparison with the Invision Board software it is a little more complicated to do similar tasks but the outcome is better overall. It's very easy to add new themes, although creating them is a bit of a work load to get your head around. I really didn't know where to start I will admit.

     So we went with the phpBB 3 forums and they are running well. It took about 2/3 hours work to get them set up (it's worth mentioning it was a reasonably complicated set-up done by someone new to the forums) but once the set-up was complete all went smoothly and I have no doubt that we chose the right solution.

---