Comments on: Forum Software - What are your thoughts?

By: Milian Wolff

Milian Wolff — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:52:07 +0000

Most important things to me (and I’ve worked with phpBB 2+3, SMF and others):

- easy integration with other Software, like $CMS, $SHOP, etc., single-sign-on would be sufficient, but shared user-databases etc. would be even better.
- plugin based => OpenID support, Mollom/Akismet integration, etc. etc.
- clean separation of templates from PHP code, Drupal is a good example here for a job well done.

By: Jelmer Vernooij

Jelmer Vernooij — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:47:13 +0000

A mailing list or NNTP gateway would be a killer feature.

By: Mez

Mez — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:53:49 +0000

What I mean by an abstracted API is so that, for example, another application can automatically link into the system, so they can, for example, have all their session and user management stuff done by calling

Session::LoadUser();

or similar, meaning that the base core components are there for anyone to use.

I’m thinking along the lines of a Framework style thing, however, most of the frameworks out there don’t go as far as that, (eZc being a noted exception) as far as I’m aware, and just put an abstraction on the bits that you’d use to put together something (form creation, input cleaning, etc etc) - whereas what I’m thinking of would go a step further, so that you can easily include all the functionality of the forums with a simple call, and have the backend use it, so you don’t have to do special code checks to see if a user is logged in, or if a user has a special permission. You just call

User::is_admin();

And that lets you know whether the user is an admin, displays a login form (from the main app) if there is one needed, etc etc.

Michael, as much as C++ is great, it’s not the easiest thing to write a web-app in.

Regarding automated update. While it’d be nice, it’s not particularly feasible.. Things being broken, etc etc.

I think regarding automated updates, something along the lines of Bzr would work well for that, espescially if you have local modifications.

Actually, come to think of it, bzr would be great for add-ons etc etc. You could just

bzr merge http://location/to/some/cool/feature

And then it’d set it all up for you…

By: Bert Van de Poel

Bert Van de Poel — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:26:37 +0000

A long time ago I did start to make my own forum with certain ideals and structures but I never finished it, the plan was to make a forum that was very simple, for users that didn’t know a lot about how forums and other webapps function, it would be almost not customisable (only with a css file) to make things even easier. It would have the basic function that all forums have but nothing extra, no plugins or whatever. I thought that people who don’t know a lot about webdesign could use it for an easy forum and also system admins and that kind of people for quick forums that don’t need a lot of administration.

By: Bogdan Bivolaru

Bogdan Bivolaru — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 05:30:49 +0000

That API based forum would be truly useful. None found so far

By: Michael "ideas" Howell

Michael "ideas" Howell — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 05:24:52 +0000

IMO, the perfect forum software would:
1) Be ROA/RESTful, and have built-in support for WSDL.
2) Produce valid and semantic XHTML (or HTML if the browser doesn’t support XHTML).
3) Support plug-ins on an abstracted core.
4) Be written in C++ (FAST!) and support runtime loaded plug-ins.
5) Support CSS style-sheets.
6) Besides the HTML/XHTML switch, produce the same markup for all browsers.
7) Support OpenID sign-in (preferably as a removable plug-in).
Produce RDFa meta-data.

By: børge

børge — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 03:13:26 +0000

I love how the Unclassified Newsboard forum software lets you get a msg trough Jabber/XMPP when there’s a new post in a thread you’re active in. I wish more forum software had support for that.

By: Henry Miller

Henry Miller — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:58:02 +0000

I always want this more than anything else: For every thread, when I click on it, it needs to take me to the next message after the last one I read. Many of them know which threads I’ve read, but in long threads I have no clue what page to visit to start today where I left yesterday. Many of the last read threads are based on when I last visited the forum as a whole, and not the thread itself, which is annoying in itself.

I’d like to see a NNTP interface to I can use a better client than a web browser as well. (This would take care of the other problems), but it appears that this is a much harder problem than I would think as I’ve never seen it.

By: Big Dan

Big Dan — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:21:12 +0000

I’m no developer and couldn’t build my own forum script however I do run a couple of vBulletin based forums which seems to be the best out there currently, I can understand the reason why Ubuntu Forums runs on vB. My preference for forum software goes like this: vBulletin > MyBB > phpBB.

Having worked alot with just about all forum package except for IPB the following things seem to be missing or poorly implemented.

Templating System: In most forum packages everything is controlled by templates which a first look is a great idea, however once you customize the template, which nearly everyone does as who wants to run a board? version upgrades especially major upgrades bring all kinds of headaches and many templates that have to manually edited. I have no ideas on how to overcome this short coming but something should be done.

Upgrades: If your software frequently releases updates, it should be able to auto update itself or at least download the package on it’s own and let the user actually run the upgrade. None of this download the package from one site, decompress it, and overwrite the server side files via http://FTP. It’s time consuming busy work.

Add-ons: It would be nice if addons were easier to install again I’d be very happy if I never had to see another FTP client.

Thanks for listening,
Dan

By: T. J. Brumfield

T. J. Brumfield — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:36:38 +0000

I’d like to addon to previous comments. I know just enough PHP and SQL to get myself in trouble, but I’d love to develop a truly superb forum software package for personal use. I’m all for keeping it OSS and letting others benefit. I don’t have the skills to start anything from scratch and what I’m looking at doing is taking something like phpbb3, installing mods, integrating gallery2, integrating wordpress and then trying to streamline it for performance. As phpbb3 continues development, I’d try to patch in diffs from their latest branch.

I want something very much feature rich in what it provides, while not dogging on performance. If you take a look at something like phpbbfm, not only is it gaudy (poor choice of modules they’ve added) you get horrid performance. They go nuts on SQL calls for useless features.

Lastly, the other big thing is to make _good_ use of AJAX features. Why do all forums still use an ancient interface? Don’t add eye candy that offers no real improvement, but why not utilize stuff like lightbox for images, ajax pop-up search boxes, auto-complete, etc? PMs should also be ajax pop-ups as opposed to pop-up windows. You should be able to drag the interface of the forum around, close down a section, open another up, etc. Reduce page-loads and allow a customizable interface that users will enjoy.