Compare Forums Software: VBulletin, IPB, PHPBB, SMF, Vanilla and bbPress
Posted in Tips, Hacks, Tricks, Web Development on Oct 20, 2008
I had been looking for a forum software to play with this morning and can’t really decide which one to choose. The choices are pretty obvious from the title of this post but here are just some personal comments about the things that I know about.
Paid BBS/Forum Software
VBulletin is simply the big daddy of bbs/forum software out there used by most popular boards. It does comes with a monthly/yearly cost depending on which licensing option you choose to buy. The VBulletin community has built tons of mods and support is good. If you have the money to spare, this should be a good investment.
IPB deserves a mention since it’s the next popular forum software which cost a fee to use it. From what I’ve read so far, IPB forum owners aren’t very happy with it and consider the admin section a mess.
Free and Open Source BBS/Forum Software
PHPBB, currently at version 3, is said to have improved functionality, admin sections and in particular enhanced security. PHPBB v2 was highly targetted by hackers at one time due to exploits in their source code. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s said that PHPBB still doesn’t have attachments and sub-forums available and you would still need to use mods to achieve that. Attachments and sub forums are readily supported out of the box in v3 as pointed out by Stan in this comment.
SMF is another open source forum software which had eveloved from YaBB. I had the opportunity to use it last year and found it having most of the features that I want (including attachments and sub forums out of the box). Mods can be installed easily and be reverted back to a certain stage if you decided that you won’t use it anymore.
The bad thing about it is that most mods are written for the default theme so if you’re using a custom theme, good luck as you will need to look through the code and do some manual tweaking to get a mod working in your custom theme. I also hate the fact that the themes are still using Smartly-like template tags which can be a show-stopper for those who came from a pure (x)html/css background.
Besides, some mods don’t even play nice with each other, and once they are installed side by side, it can be too late for you to disable the mod and revert back to a previous state before the mod was installed. This was really what frustrated me. If I had to do it again, my advice would be to use everything out of the box and just let the forum grow before doing anything fancy.
Vanilla is probably not as famous as the other flavors but the most attractive feature that I’ve found about it is its ease of use and configurations. It’s not as bloated as the others but that might also be a shortcoming for owners/moderators who want more control and options. I’ve also found that it’s the easiest to install and uninstall new mods and themes without facing any problems at all before (unlike SMF).
bbPress is released by Automatic, who brought us the popular blogging platform WordPress. It’s dead simple, fast and elegant and is used by wordpress support forums, technorati support and 9rules notes with huge user base and huge daily traffic.
As a side note, I would say one shouldn’t think that a good forum software will build you a good forum community. A good forum software is just a start and don’t forget it’s actually the admin and moderating team who are the ones that will be putting in the intial effort to build an active community. Not even the best software can help you build the community if you don’t have a dedicated team of people to stay in it for the long term.
* Oh, did I mention that all of the above forums software are driven by PHP and MySQL?!
[...] forgot to mention yet another popular forum software known as Discuz back in this forum software compared post but just in case you’re curious, its like VBulletin with lots of those standard features [...]
Hi forum users and readers I hope you can solve a stupid problem with my computer
Im getting a lot of popups when Im browsing the internet, sometimes even when Im not at the computer, I leave it on for
an hour and when I get back I have 2-3 popups that have appeared from nowhere. How can I remove this? Im really not intrested
in finding adult friends or downloading a new screen saver
Please help me, Im kind of low on budget and wouldnt like to take the computer to an expert and pay a lot of cash for it, all the ideas are welcome
and I will definetly try them! Hope to hear from you soon!
From the phbBB site (http://www.phpbb.com/support/documentation/).
Section 3.2:
“One of the many new features in phpBB 3.0 is Attachments.”
Section 3.3:
“One of the many new features in phpBB 3.0 are subforums.”
Cheers,
Stan
Hi people,
just want to introduce myself on http://www.davidtan.org, hope this is the right category for that purpose.
Greez,
Max
SMF uses Smartly-like template tags? Probably a good idea to look at the software you are writing about before doing a comparison?
Good call, at first sight I thought I was looking at smarty template tag, which in fact are just normal php.
I think you are confusing IPB’s acp with vBulletin acp.
The IPB acp is one of the best things with IPB and none of its users complains about it. Instead it’s vBulletin users who complains about their crappy acp design and layout.
And the new IPB3 being released in a few weeks is far superior to the current vBulletin version, both in features, design, code and framework.
vBulletin is today obsolete and its future look grim.
Hey
Do you have an idea about where Economic crisis is ending?
Nobody knows that for sure. All we know is that 2009 has been perceived as a tougher year compared to 2007 and 2008 by the media, which is pretty likely judging by the current situation. Time will tell.
[...] and plugins, particularly WordPress Multi-User and BuddyPress, combined, or one of the various online forum apps (e.g., BBPress or [...]
[...] video will show you how to integrate a bbPress forum with your wordpress blog. My comparison of forum software scripts includes bbPress and there is no doubt that bbPress is a good candidate if you want to have a forum [...]
I would just like to comment on your observations about SMF.
Mods being written for the default theme, is not really a big deal actually.
You can find all the needed edits straight from SM.org, from the same page you download the mod from. And in many cases, installing to a custom theme is only a matter of editing 1 or 2 files, as when ever a custom theme is lacking a file, it is loaded from the default theme anyways. ( That is basically why all mods require the default theme to be there, and are written to install to it. )
Smartly-like template tags I think got covered already
Because EVERYTHING can be modified in SMF, of course some mods can clash and interfere with each other in a way that some of your functionality can even be lost. But not to worry – You can ALWAYS revert the filechanges of the last mod install. This is a little known handy feature of SMF.
When ever you install a mod, the package manager saves the file setup in /Packages/Backup. Take a look there, if you have an SMF install somewhere
In addition to that, you have an option in the package manager, to create backup files marked with ~. Just take a look at your FTP after a mod install, and you’ll find these there.
And even without these options, you usually can uninstall a mod just as easily as it was installed. And if not – then something has gone wrong, that is most probably not because of SMF itself.
You can also protect yourself from these little accidents by taking a backup of all your files (and database), always before installing mods. That way nothing can ever be totally lost if something were to fail.
SMF also has a friendly and helpful community online, where you can always turn to – when you feel you are lost with the software somehow.
Feel free to come by, you’ll find me and many others there.
Merry Christmas to all… and to all a good night.