So I’ve been noticing things left and right that I just don’t like about Vanilla Forums. Such as it being extremely difficult to code for, not using BBCode, breaking if you stay on it after a while without refreshing, and their template system not allowing PHP. Today I had the last straw break when I tried to add in a “New Topic†button in the navigation menu and found I’d have to make a plugin to do this. Now it’s true I’ve been out of the forum game for a while, but I find this to be a rediculas situation that shows how difficult Vanilla is to work with coding wise. Not only that, but it’s hard to make complecated posts like multi-quoting and such. This I’ve learned from being part of a community that uses Vanilla (The same community that gave me the idea to use it). But in this day and age is there anything better and free that offers Facebook intergration? Well, I replay to that with “Do we really need it�
Facebook intergration should stop people from registering, and it’s as simple as that. Anyone who is searious about posting and becoming part of a community is going to be someone with no problem going through a bit of registration. Those who must use Facebook intergrated accounts are most likely going to be people too lazy to post good topics, replies, arguments, or even use proper grammar. Now that Facebook intergration is out of the way we can focus on picking a more stable set of forum software than Vanilla (Or Xenfoto if you want to pay $300 for web forum software).
Simple Machine Forums, or SMF is normally a good choice. I’ve seen a lot of good communities use them, and have used them myself. They’re hard to code for also, but have mostly everything you’ll need to run a good forum out of the box. Not too hard to theme for eather, and their BBCode is done very nicely. On the down side it’s kinda bulky, and I find difficulty in coding for something to be a huge downer. So what else is there?
FluxBB 1.5 was started as a fork of PunBB, and is a great lightweight BBS that allows ease of use, ease of coding, and ease of theme creation. All of these are very great things to here, but their is a catch. It doesn’t come with a lot of things out of the box. Not even Private Messaging. There are a lot of plugins to remedy that; however, but it also doesn’t display the last topic posted in by default. I have yet to find a plugin for that, so Iâ€m stuck always doing it manually, and that’s extremely teadious. So is there a holy grail of forum software? I believe so, and it’s close, but so far away.
The holy grail of forum software is going to be none other than FluxBB 2.0. It’s getting a extreme overhall that seems great. Including touch screen support, and other things that will be sure to excite any fan of FluxBB (like myself). So why don’t we all just hop on and start using Flux 2.0 right away? Because it’s still in Alpha, and from the looks of things it’ll be there until at least the end of the year. We just have to wait, find a board that we don’t dispise using in the mean time.
From: http://blog.strange-coast.com/forum-software-blues/
Facebook intergration should stop people from registering, and it’s as simple as that. Anyone who is searious about posting and becoming part of a community is going to be someone with no problem going through a bit of registration. Those who must use Facebook intergrated accounts are most likely going to be people too lazy to post good topics, replies, arguments, or even use proper grammar. Now that Facebook intergration is out of the way we can focus on picking a more stable set of forum software than Vanilla (Or Xenfoto if you want to pay $300 for web forum software).
Simple Machine Forums, or SMF is normally a good choice. I’ve seen a lot of good communities use them, and have used them myself. They’re hard to code for also, but have mostly everything you’ll need to run a good forum out of the box. Not too hard to theme for eather, and their BBCode is done very nicely. On the down side it’s kinda bulky, and I find difficulty in coding for something to be a huge downer. So what else is there?
FluxBB 1.5 was started as a fork of PunBB, and is a great lightweight BBS that allows ease of use, ease of coding, and ease of theme creation. All of these are very great things to here, but their is a catch. It doesn’t come with a lot of things out of the box. Not even Private Messaging. There are a lot of plugins to remedy that; however, but it also doesn’t display the last topic posted in by default. I have yet to find a plugin for that, so Iâ€m stuck always doing it manually, and that’s extremely teadious. So is there a holy grail of forum software? I believe so, and it’s close, but so far away.
The holy grail of forum software is going to be none other than FluxBB 2.0. It’s getting a extreme overhall that seems great. Including touch screen support, and other things that will be sure to excite any fan of FluxBB (like myself). So why don’t we all just hop on and start using Flux 2.0 right away? Because it’s still in Alpha, and from the looks of things it’ll be there until at least the end of the year. We just have to wait, find a board that we don’t dispise using in the mean time.
From: http://blog.strange-coast.com/forum-software-blues/