Comments on: Customisation

By: QE

QE — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 20:20:20 +0000

I got around to having a look at bbPress, and I didn’t realise quite how immature it was. It’ll be brilliant in a couple of years, but as a person who doesn’t really have the time or the skill to be a serious contributor it may be too much work for me now.

Although it’s a huge hassle to maintain and modify, phpBB does what I need it to, and is the only such thing I’ve found so far.

By: Dragon

Dragon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:32:52 +0000

PhpBB has it’s appeal in that of all the forums I’ve used, it’s quite easy and generally does what you need it to do. This is the first time I’ve tried customising it and doing any administration.

PHPNuke was, as far as I was concerned, a mess. I don’t mean to slander freeware as such - Wordpress is a joy to use and customise although I’m yet to attempt any plugins for it so I can’t comment on the API. But PHPNuke and PHPBB are the type of thing that I mean: good ideas that have spiralled out of control. The fact that PHPNuke needs a load of security patching before you can feasibly deploy it is ridiculous. The admin screen annoyed me too.

I’ll perservere with PHPBB for now but will keep an eye on BBpress because it’s likely to be great - if it’s anything like WP that is.

By: QE

QE — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 11:33:21 +0000

I like to use phpBB, and I like to admin things I like to use: I think I have a fondness for it since it was the first thing of its sort I picked up, before I realised things could be easier. It desperately needs a plugin API though, because making people edit the core for even the simplest of mods is crazy. The actual template engine is quite nice, but the management of styles themselves seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought, with problems like the hardcoding you describe and quirks like inserting CSS from the DB into the head of each page.

“That’s the problem with freeware systems like this…”
That’s not really it though, is it? You like WP and you know how much I rave about Nucleus CMS, and both are GPL, same as phpBB.

They’ve for phpBB 3 in beta, but I’m not hopeful that it will fix these things. I still haven’t found anything decent though: maybe bbPress will be the answer.

Incidentally, what did you make of PHPNuke? I realise it probably sucks, but I doubt it sucks much more than Drupal, which is what I currently use.

By: Lyle

Lyle — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:08:32 +0000

phpBB is evil - one of the few worse things I’ve experienced was the phpBB plug-in for Mambo. That one *really* needed shooting.

Did you see, though, that the people behind Wordpress have launched a beta release of bbPress, a forum done in similar style to WP, with lots of cuddly niceness such as you describe…