PHP Forum Software Showdown

• November 18, 2006
• James Skemp
• software, tutorials / guides

Hopefully by the end of the month, I'll have posted six reviews for six different pieces of forum software, that run on PHP (and MySQL).

The six software programs are as follows.

• bbPress 0.73 (released October 27, 2006) - http://bbpress.org/
• MyBB 1.2.1 (released September 27, 2006) - http://www.mybboard.com/
• phpBB 2.0.21 (released June 9, 2006) - http://www.phpbb.com/
• PunBB 1.2.14 (released October 15, 2006) - http://www.punbb.org/
• Simple Machines 1.0.9 (released October 29, 2006) - http://www.simplemachines.org/
• Vanilla 1.0.1 (released August 21, 2006) - http://getvanilla.com/

Some of the things that I'll be covering include:

• Installation and setup
  • Steps
  • Requirements (PHP and database versions)
  • Installer and installation sizes
• Code
  • Valid?
  • How 'clean' is it to read and navigate (the code)
• Upgrading
• Default layout
• Admin interface
• Out-of-the-box functionality/features
• Age and approximate usage
• Extendability

Any other recommendations would be greatly appreciated - either of things to cover, or of other forums to review. Please note that forums must be free/open source, and run on PHP and MySQL, minimum.

View all of the steps to creating a local Web server, for development.

• php