Best open source forum script available?

Team Member Joined: 09 Jan 2002 Posts: 147 Location: UK

Just interested to see what people think is the best. I've finally become sick of Phorum after the last botched upgrade. FudForum is great but a little too complicated for my liking (especially the template system), and W-Agora didn't meet my expectations?

So what do other people like? I'm after something that's well written, with efficient code (which is what puts me off phpBB at the moment) and threading would be a very big bonus Smile

Peter

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

I'm kind of interested in why you think phpBB's code is unefficient. That's usually one of the arguments for phpBB. I'm not trying to defend phpBB here; I'm genuinely interested Smile

.

Team Member Joined: 09 Jan 2002 Posts: 147 Location: UK

Damn, I should have realised that when I made a statement like that someone would ask me to produce evidence for it Wink

Mostly it's hearsay from just after phpBB was released, when I last seriously looked at using it. I'd like to see caching of the compiled templates for starters, and caching the compiled/converted bb code - ideally all forum pages would be saved as static HTML until changed. I don't know of any forum that does this, but I can wish for it Smile

Also, any forum benchmarks I've come across put phpBB as being slow.

More maybe tomorrow from me on this subject. I need to sleep now!

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Well if you're interested, phpBB has a replacement version of template.php which uses caching (in use here!). However that only works for templates. I don't know of any board which caches more than that Smile

. phpBB 2.2 should see less work being done "on the fly" and more of it done during posting.

I take it when you say "released" you mean phpBB 2? Because phpBB 1.x was always, IMO, very crappy. I don't know if you remember, but we tested it at users.f2s for a while, and nobody seemed very impressed.

Team Member Joined: 09 Jan 2002 Posts: 147 Location: UK

Glad to know there's something with caching in now. I keep on hearing talk about phpBB 2.2, but it still seems a long way off.

I never looked @ phpBB 1.X as it was too **** Wink

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

The caching option has been in since the release of phpBB Peter Smile

. Yes, phpBB 2.2 probably is a long way off. My estimate (not worth anything! Smile

) is that the next (stable/official - not RC/Beta) release will be at the end of this year or even the beginning of next year.

WebHelper Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 69 Location: Texas

Peter wrote:

...ideally all forum pages would be saved as static HTML until changed. I don't know of any forum that does this, but I can wish for it Smile

If you have any level of activity on your forum at all, then very few of the pages will be static. And if you don't have a lot of activity, then who cares if your pages take a bit to render. Wink

If you're talking about typical forum software, then every page hit has the potential to change the content. For example, phpBB tracks "Topic Views". So just by looking at a topic, you've changed the content of the page. None of the pages on my forum have static content; even the basic pages include things like how many members / how many posts / stuff like that.

I'm running phpBB on a shared host, on a board with 100-150 posts per day. I have been very pleased with performance. I just recently cut the styles information out of the templates and put it into an external style sheet; that has improved performance even more. Not that people were complaining before, but it does seem snappier. And I'm not currently using the caching template system that they use here. So there's room to improve even more.

The phpBB forum itself is 10 times the size of mine. They don't seem to have any problems running the software. Smile

I looked at several packages... only two very seriously (ubb and phpBB) and went with phpBB. Frankly I'm a bit worried about the often mentioned but yet to be visible 2.2, as it may include a host of features that I don't want or don't care about, with the possible cost of more bandwidth / processing time / database size / whatever. I never used version 1, but have been a very happy customer of version 2.

My two cents. YMMV. Smile

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 3:03 pm (21 years, 1 month ago)

My yabbse gets about 400,000 page views a month and is standing up well but is very ugly