PHP based forum systems.

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

So I've been doing some reviewing of PHP based forum systems for potential
replacement of Squishdot on Gnotices. There are quite a few out there, and
these are my first impressions (without actually looking at the code, just
reading about documents and other things on the web).


PHPNuke (http://www.phpnuke.org/):

First impression: Somewhat pretentious, but seems to work well. Has a lot of
features, amongst them HTML 4 transitional compliancy and a lot of
customizability.

Advantages: Fairly mature, under active development, HTML 4 Transitional
compliant, very customizable.

Disadvantages: Seems very "running the entire site" oriented, overfeatured
and complex, "everything in the database", author seems to not be very
willing to take patches, so might have to maintain customizations on our own.


PHPSlash (http://www.phpslash.org/):

First impression: Fairly new, developers seem dedicated to making releases,
sites using it look nice (very close clones of Slashdot).

Advantages: Codebase seems simple and not too over-featured, under active
development, reasonable amount of customizability, uses PHPLib.

Disadvantages: Not very mature (authors say it should be ok for
low-to-medium-load production environments, high load environments not
tested), seems to use its own template system.


phpWebLog (http://www.phpweblog.org/ (I'm starting to see a pattern in these
URLs)):

First impression: My, this looks a lot like a simpler version of Kuro5hin.
Not terribly mature codebase, but seems to have the essential functionality
working. Todo list somewhat disheartening.

Advantages: Simple, not too pretentious.

Disadvantages: Seems a little immature. Todo list has a lot of flashy
features but not much genuinely useful. Doesn't use any other libraries, and
has a separate template system.


thatphpware (http://www.thatware.org/):

First impression: Simplistic. New codebase. Seems to have most essential
features.

Advantages: Small, simple.

Disadvantages: A lot of fairly useful features not implemented yet. Uses a
funky pseudo-HTML-tag system for embedding stuff. Still uses its own template
system.



These were the ones I found while quickly looking over the offerings out
there. None of them seem to be a perfect fit for what we want to do. If I
were to make a recommendation at this point, I would be partial to rip out
the backend part of one of these systems, and then reimplement the frontend
so it plays nice with the rest of our site and templates, etc. If we're doing
that, it would probably be good to use the most mature and well-tested
codebase we can find. Still, I'm not convinced that this is the best thing to
do. Opinions very welcome.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/