phpBB is a Joke

December 2, 2007 | Under Forum Software, PHPBB | Leave a Comment 

If, five years ago, you would have asked me what forum software I’d recommend using, I would have said phpBB. I was ignorant and inexperienced ; telling you to use phpBB would probably have been some of the worst advice I could give you. While I’ve come a long way form what I was five years ago, it seems that phpBB has been going in the opposite direction. PhpBB has been developing their 3.X series for the past four or five years. While this is an unusually long development time, one might expect an abundance of new features. While there are many new features to phpBB, phpBB still lacks many of the basic forum features that other forum softwares - both free and paid - currently offer. Not only is phpBB void of many features and their development sluggish, they just can’t seem to get it right.

Today they’ve just release RC8. Back in October they released to Release Candidates - withing 48 hours. Honestly, what kind of software group takes over four years to develop their next version and release 8 Release Candidates? More release candidates from this software group are sure to come before it goes Gold. It’s typical for a software company to have a RC2 or RC3, but much after that is a bit ridiculous.

If you’re new to the forum business I’d highly recommend you look at phpBB with a weary eye. If you’re looking for a free solution I strongly suggest myBB. PhpBB might be something a new forum administrator might want to mess around with, but if you’re serious about running a forum, stay away from this software.

Vbulletin 3.7 First Look

November 25, 2007 | Under Forum Software, Vbulletin | Leave a Comment 

Two days ago, vbulletin showed us a preview of the upcoming 3.7 release. This release focuses on social networking, and we see many new features. The new version will be implemented on vbulletin.com on Monday. Following that it will enter a beta release. The timeframe of the beta release depends on any bugs or issues found. My personal guess is that it will enter beta testing later next week and will be fully released late the following week.

I’m not going to cover all of the features here, but I do wish to highlight some I think will be particularly interesting to use.

The new version includes tagging, in which users can add tags to posts and threads. These tags will describe the thread - when a particular tag is selected, it will display all posts with that tag. This gives us the typical “tag cloud.”

Furthermore, users can now add pictures to picture galleries. While these albums are a great additional feature, it’s still limited. It’s not meant to be a global gallery, as users can’t add photos to group albums. I predict this will be a feature in vbulletin 4.0 or with an additional addon modification.

The most significant changes are those of the user profile. There is now a reciprocal friendship feature and commenting on user profiles. The user profile has had a major rewrite, and now has a more “myspace” look. Administrators can define additional fields that can be displayed on the right column. The user profiles are also customizable by the user - they can design it how they like. Unfortunately, this version does not allow users to drag-and-drop profile boxes or add custom ones themselves.

Another highly notable addition is the social group feature. Now users can create their own groups based on certain interests. These groups can have a group photo gallery, and also has a commenting system similar to the “facebook wall.” While this commenting system is fantastic, it still leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not a full forum for that group, though I suppose administrators could add forums for groups manually on an as-needed basis.

In addition to these features, there are additional spam prevention tools, thread prefixes, post edit history, attachment viewing lightbox, profile visitor tracking, automatic resizing of attached images, custom icons for each forum, advertisement locations definable with templates, YUI instead of AJAX, and many more features.

I’m very pleased with this release and look forward to implementing it. This release has giving vbulletin users a lot of what they asked for, even though many of those were already existing modifications. Now they have official support.