FOSSwire

In the last post in this multi-part series, I'm going to look at arguably one of the most popular PHP free forum solutions out there, phpBB. It is designed to be feature-rich and a complete solution for building an online forum.

It requires PHP 4.3.3 and a supported database (including MySQL, Oracle, Postgres and even Microsoft SQL Server). I'll be covering the latest version at the time of writing, 3.0.1. As always, it's all about Ease of Installation, Features, Extensibility and Themes.

Ease of Installation

The extraction is pretty much a standard process, with both zip and tar+bzip2 archives available on the downloads page. Once you've extracted, you have a phpBB3 folder.

Right off the bat here, you can browse to the folder you extracted to to get this fancy-looking Installer.

It's nice and clear, provided you realise you need to click the Installation tab. Once you're on it, you click through to a Requirements screen, which compares what you have on your server with what you need and optional components. This does make it nice and clear of any issues you might need to clear up before you proceed.

At this point, I changed the permissions on config.php, as it identified the file as not being writable.

Now you enter the database details (setting up a database first if you don't have one) and move on. If you didn't set the permissions on config.php to be writable, you will at this point have to copy and paste the completed contents manually into the file.

After this point, you have an opportunity to set some basic options before the database tables are created and filled with data. After that, delete the install directory and you're ready!

The installation process here isn't quite as streamlined as some, but the Installer is well written, fairly clear and elegant.

Ease of Installation Score: 7/10

Features

phpBB is all about features. One of the main aims of phpBB is to provide what most people want in a forum, so that they don't have to go and hack the core code or add plugins to get commonly desired functionality.

This means that phpBB is chock full of features right from the beginning. These include:

• BBCode
• Emoticons
• Categories and unlimited subforums
• Avatars and Signatures
• Ranks
• Private Messaging
• Access Control Lists and Pruning

If you don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling around installing extra things after the main software to get the features you want, phpBB definitely fits the bill in this area and certainly has an impressive featureset.

Features Score: 8/10

Extensibility

This is my big gripe with phpBB. Unlike other forum systems, that utilise a plugin architecture, phpBB has no way of adding external features to the main software without ugly mods (involving patching the core files).

Sure, mods do work, but they're a lot more difficult to install most of the time and they add numerous changes and therefore complications to the software that discourage people from doing important security updates to the core software itself.

I would love to see phpBB include a real plugin system for a future major release. It would clean this process up so much and make a lot of developers, site owners and security people a lot more happy.

On the positive site, the newest mods generally ship with browser-based install instructions that do walk you through most of the process of manually updating files. Thanks to phpBB's popularity, there is also a huge quantity of third-party mods available.

Extensibility Score: 1/10

Themes

phpBB's themes system, called Styles, is very well executed. As well as a massive community of designers building themes and therefore a wide range to choose from, Themes are pretty easy to install and apply.

You head over to the Styles Database, download a zip package and extract it into your styles/ directory. A simple trip to the Admin CP later, you can apply that style. The process works just how it should. Well, actually, no.

I searched, but the Styles DB only appears to list phpBB 2.x styles right now, which isn't much use when it comes to phpBB 3.0.1.

Third party sites, however, do offer lots of phpBB 3.0 styles, and once you do get the right package the installation process is simple and you get up and running with a new style almost instantly.

From a technical perspective, the templates are built using HTML with custom tags (through custom HTML comments) to define dynamic sections that are evauated by phpBB at runtime to build the templates into the relevant pages. It's not quite as simple as some systems I've seen, but I guess it does the job adequately.

Themes Score: 6/10

Overall

Feature-wise, phpBB is very hard to beat this side of the source code divide. As I've said already several times, if you don't want the hassle of installing plugins for features like avatars and PM that other forums don't include in the core, phpBB might be for you.

Having said that, if you really want to go wild with features, you will be stuck using the (to put it politely) less-than-optimum mod system, which could quickly become infuriating following software updates to the phpBB core software itself.

It does have a large dedicated support community, however, and lots of others are using it. phpBB is a bit like Marmite - you either love it or hate it, and sometimes it can be an acquired taste. Personally, I don't particularly bite, and would prefer something a bit lighter, but it takes all sorts.

phpBB, you get a 5.5 out of 10.

Welcome back to the open source forum shootout, here at FOSSwire. In this part, I'm going to take a look at PunBB.

Like all of the other forum solutions I've covered so far in this series, PunBB is written in PHP. The current stable is 1.2.17, and development work is being done on the 1.3 branch. For now, I'll take a look at 1.2.17.

Just as before, I'll cover the following categories: Ease of Installation, Features, Extensibility and Themes.

Ease of Installation

The first thing that is slightly different about a PunBB install is that the downloaded package isn't suitable for uploading straight to the server and extracting. Inside the downloaded archive, there are three folders - docs, extras and upload.

As the name suggests here, you are meant to upload the contents of the upload directory to your server and the other directories are just so you have those other files available to you locally. It makes sense when you think about it, but does buck from the trend of other installations.

Once you have copied the right directory over, here is how the installation continues:

• Create a MySQL database and set the relevant privileges for PunBB's use.
• Run install.php from your web browser to enter your database settings and create the admin PunBB user.
• 
• You then copy and paste the completed config files from the web interface onto the web server.
• Finally, you must allow the web server write permission to the cache and avatar directories.

The extra permission step does potentially pose a problem to the unexperienced user, but the step of manually creating and editing the config file is removed in favour of automatically generating the needed code.

Overall, then, the installation process is about the same as the others. Some things are easier, and some things are more complicated.

Ease of Installation Score: 6/10

Features

I've got to try and avoid being unfair to PunBB in this section. One of the main focuses of PunBB is that it is light. Unlike heavyweights like phpBB that cram in a lot of features, PunBB tries to keep things nice and clean and simple.

With this in mind, the features that PunBB offers include:

• BBCode for post formatting
• Avatars
• Differing user ranks, based on post counts
• Signatures

Some more advanced features obviously are missing here when compared to some of those heavyweight forum systems.

Features Score: 3.5/10

Extensibility

Less emphasis is given on plugins than on the other solutions I have covered so far. Nevertheless, there is a solution for adding functionality to punBB's core system, which are described as Projects.

There is a hub for Projects and Themes (which I'll cover in the next section), called PunBB Resource. It is always a good idea to have a single community website where these things can be downloaded. It makes them easier to find, and adds an element of peer review.

From a technical point of view, Projects aren't nearly as elegant as competing plugin systems. A Project requires the editing of core files, which is something that can cause serious complications when upgrades to core PunBB need to be made (i.e. reapplying all of your mods after each upgrade).

Despite this, the installation of a Project is made a lot easier thanks to web-based install scripts. After downloading a package, you copy the changed files from the files/ directory and paste them into the main PunBB directory, and then run the web-based script to finish the installation (usually updating the database).

It does work, but the way that modifications to the core are done and the installation routine aren't nearly as good as a dedicated plugin architecture.

Extensibility Score: 5/10

Themes

Once again, there are many themes listed and available for download at PunBB Resource.

Much like Projects, you download a theme and then extract it into the style/ directory of your PunBB installation. The templates themselves are generally separate from the themes, as themes just offer a new stylesheet to render the default templates with.

If you go into the include/template directory, however, you can edit the templates directly. Again, like other forum systems, it's standard HTML with some custom tags that get filled with the relevant data at runtime. Unlike some other templating systems, however, PunBB's templates are easy to read and understand with just a little HTML experience.

This means that customising templates and themes is a lot simpler than in some competitors. While the themes on offer might not have much in terms of 'flashiness', the simple way in which they are constructed makes it a whole load easier to do customisation to make your PunBB installation fit in with the rest of your website's theme.

Themes Score: 6/10

Overall

PunBB's focus is a little different than that of the two forums I have already covered. Keeping things light is apparently a priority for the developers, and occasionally this can come at the cost of more advanced features.

This doesn't necessarily mean than PunBB will make sense for every deployment. Where those extra features aren't so important, though, and you want things to be simple, snappy and easy to integrate with an existing site, PunBB is a great solution.

For that reason I'm going to be more generous with its overall score than I have with the individual category scores. PunBB gets a solid 6 out of 10.

In part 2 of this multi-parter, I'll be looking at open source forum solution Phorum. Just as before, I'll cover Ease of Installation, Features, Extensibility and Themes.

So, let's get started!

Phorum currently is at version 5.2.7, and unlike some other forum solutions, has a requirement for PHP 5.2 and MySQL. 5.0. The required version numbers of these packages might make it difficult for people to use Phorum reliably in some hosting environments, but quite frankly I don't blame the developers for moving on from the very old versions of PHP.

Ease of Installation

Once you've downloaded the Phorum package, the installation process proceeds roughly as follows:

• Extract the package.
• Set up a new database for Phorum, with full read/write access.
• Edit include/db/config.sample.php, adding your new database details, save as include/db/config.php.
• 
• Browse to /admin.php in your new Phorum installation to complete the install. Follow the instructions on that page.
• Set up the Modules you want switched on from the start.

Once that is complete, Phorum is installed and you can start using it and altering the settings from the admin interface.

The installation process here is pretty standard and is on par with competitors. There is an inevitable step of having to edit a configuration file, but this is standard practice across the range and shouldn't be an issue if you have done similar web application installs before.

Ease of Installation Score: 6/10

Features

In terms of features, Phorum tries to be fairly light, but offer modules as a solution to get advanced features. The features included as part of the core Phorum package include:

• Forum categories, as well as multiple subforum levels.
• RSS
• Signatures
• Private messaging

Interestingly, there are quite a few features that are usually found as part of a core package that don't make an appearance in Phorum. These features include support for avatars and even BBCode. While some of these modules do ship with the base package and are easy enough to apply, it does seem interesting that BBCode in particular is excluded from the base. Without either the BBCode or HTML modules, posts in the forum will be formatting-free.

Nevertheless, there are a decent set of modules which do allow these core functions to be extended, which is what I will discuss in a moment.

Features Score: 3/10

Extensibility

As I've mentioned earlier, Phorum uses a Modules system to provide extensibility to the software. Phorum actually ships with several modules as part of the base package, which allows you to get access to just the features you want.

The number of modules available from the Phorum team is pretty good, and cover many more advanced or obscure features that a forum administrator might want. There is a complete list of official modules available on their Development site.

As well as those official ones, third-party developers are also free to add functionality in the form of Modules, and there is a whole forum dedicated to listing those third-party modules.

In my opinion, having a good plugin system is absolutely vital for any forum system. No package will ever provide all the features a certain community will want, and the lack of a plugin system ends up with people performing ugly hacks to the core source code.

From what I have seen of it, Phorum's module system seems as good as anyone's.

Extensibility - 8.5/10

Themes

Another big thing is of course, themes. Few people will be willing to stick with whatever ships as default with their software.

Phorum uses a simple HTML-based templating system, which makes it relatively easy for people familiar with making web pages in HTML and with a little experience of working with templating systems to make templates.

It also ships with three templates by default, which are located in the templates/ folder. Thanks to the simple templating language, it is fairly simple again for anyone familiar with HTML to customise these templates to make them unique enough to use to build your own site.

For a completely different look, there are also complete community-built templates that you can download from this forum on Phorum's site.

I found that locating third party templates wasn't quite as easy than, say, phpBB, mostly due to the smaller user base. Nevertheless, from a technical point of view, the templating system is probably superior to that of phpBB and it is a lot easier to jump in and understand.

Themes - 6.5/10

Overall

Phorum looks like a serious contender to the likes of phpBB. Unlike bbPress, it is stable, has a much larger user base, but still brings a decent plugin architecture and clean core to a forum solution.

There are some situations where you might not want to go with Phorum, particularly if you want to have some of the more advanced forum features working right out of the box, but for many purposes I would definitely recommend Phorum.

I'm going to give Phorum a 7 out of 10 score overall. It will get the job done and give you the features you might need thanks to Modules, but I don't think it particularly brings anything highly special and unique to the table.