Comments on: I need some recommendations for a good message forum board platform/software.

Question: I need some recommendations for a good message forum board platform/software.

smcniven — Fri, 28 May 2004 06:00:58 -0800

I need some recommendations for a good message forum board platform/software [more inside]

My development group is toying with starting a discussion board/forum to post tips and tricks, and ask questions about various problems.

We've been asked to look at various solutions and offer up suggestions at a developer's meeting later today.

We are a SQL Server & IIS shop so what ever we go with needs to work on those platforms. As well, we need something that is low maintenance, easy to install, no registration needed etc... Basically something that won't eat up too many cycles for who ever is installing/maintaining it. The system will be used by about a dozen developers intermittently.

Any suggestions would be great appreciated.

By: Gnatcho

Gnatcho — Fri, 28 May 2004 06:08:41 -0800

You mean like phpBB? I've used it and it's quite good. It's GPL and has a pretty default theme. It's also reasonably easy to manage.

I presume this would be private, and thus would be installed on an intranet. I don't have any knowledge of using it there.

By: smcniven

smcniven — Fri, 28 May 2004 06:10:25 -0800

Good catch Gnatcho. I forgot to mention that this would be an internal type thing, installed on our Intranet. I don't think we want anything that would be hosted on another server.

By: Gnatcho

Gnatcho — Fri, 28 May 2004 06:13:31 -0800

Still, it should work on an intranet because, of course, phpBB is only software and also doesn't go hunting for resources elsewhere.

By: Marquis

Marquis — Fri, 28 May 2004 06:13:33 -0800

I chose to use Phorum when setting up Gmail Swap, and it's worked very well: extremely simple, and practical. If you want a ton of features, though, it's not the best fit.

By: danOstuporStar

danOstuporStar — Fri, 28 May 2004 06:55:21 -0800

since you didn't immediately upchuck at the phpBB suggestion, we can assume you're running PHP4 on yr IIS server?

(Phorum doesn't support SQL Server does it?)

By: smcniven

smcniven — Fri, 28 May 2004 07:25:23 -0800

Looks like phpBB was the winner. Another developer was playing around with it this week and demoed it to the group.

Our only issue is that we would need to install a PHP interpreter on the IIS server (we're a .NET shop), and our manager is balking at doing that right now (something about the server build belonging to another group, needs to get QA'd, documented etc..)

Our workaround is to host the site on one of our workstations, and use our SQL server to handle the database.

Since it will only be a dozen or so users, it shouldn't be that bad for the short term.

By: y6y6y6

y6y6y6 — Fri, 28 May 2004 07:40:32 -0800

I've run php webservers on my Win2K workstation to host things like this internally. I usually do it with php/Apache/MySQL though. It's all free, easy to set up, and works great.

By: willnot

willnot — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:20:15 -0800

additional oppinions/suggestions here.

By: smcniven

smcniven — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:40:59 -0800

willnot: ironically, I posted in that thread. We looked at the ASP.NET community starter kit (that I mentioned in the thread) but felt it was too complicated for our needs.

phpBB is the winner it seems.

By: tomierna

tomierna — Fri, 28 May 2004 14:09:07 -0800

I like phpBB, but prefer punBB. It's way lighter weight, and also uses compliant CSS and XHTML.