FOSSwire

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.

In this multi-part post, I'll be going through and looking at several different open source forum solutions. When it comes to forum software, one of the most popular choices is phpBB. However, it's by no means the only option for setting up a forum using FOSS, so here I'll be looking at some alternatives you can use.

In each of these quick-fire shootout posts, I'll cover four issues for each forum software - Ease of Installation, Features, Extensibility and Themes. Of course, There's a lot of things I could cover further and in more detail, but for now we'll focus purely on these four elements.

First up, and the subject of this post - bbPress.

As the name suggests, bbPress is built by the same team that give you blogging software WordPress, and attempts to bring WP's focus and ethos into a forum system. Right now, the package is only at version 0.9.0.2 and isn't quite as stable as some of the other packages I'll be covering in future parts.

Ease of Installation

Installing web applications can make or break them - a difficult installation routine could mean that it becomes easier to plump for a simpler option, even if that has less features.

After downloading the bbPress files, the installation process roughly goes as follows:

• Extract the package.
• Set up a database for bbPress use.
• 
• Copy the bb-config-sample.php to bb-config.php, fill in database details and secret key.
• Browse to the new installation in your web browser, and run the brief setup wizard.
• 

As installation processes for web applications go, it's not that bad. The somewhat unavoidable database steps could cause confusion for new users, but the similarity with how WordPress is installed should make it easier for anyone with some experience installing WordPress.

Ease of Installation Score - 6/10

Features

Bearing in mind that bbPress is still pre-release, we'll now take a look at the features that bbPress offers compared to competing forum systems.

All of the basic features you need are there and in addition to those, bbPress does sport the following (and more):

• Unlimited subforums
• Anti-spam provided by Akismet service
• WYSIWYG post composition, largely eliminating the need for BBCode
• SEO-friendly rewritten URLs, i.e. /forums/1 instead of /forum.php?id=1

One of bbPress' major issues right now, however, is a lack of many of the more advanced features of other forum packages. This is intentional - the idea is that the core of bbPress is kept as lean and clean as possible, and a WordPress-style plugin architecture is used to provide support for these extra features.

Right now, however, there are not that many plugins, meaning feature-wise it may not be as rich as competing solutions. That should change as the popularity increases, however, which is why extensibility is so important here.

Features Score - 4/10

Extensibility

As I've just mentioned, bbPress features an excellent plugin system, based on the WordPress plugin architecture. Plugins aren't that plentiful yet, but their ease of installation and use runs circles around the extensibility of phpBB, for example (where mod files have to be applied manually to patch the core files).

The separation of the core system and the plugins in this way ensures that the problems faced by other extensibility systems are reduced. For example, when a security update for bbPress becomes available, it can be applied quickly and easily, usually without affecting plugins.

To compare with phpBB's mod system again, in that case an update to phpBB would require you to manually reapply all the mods, which is a long and laborious process. The knock on effect here can often mean forum administrators cannot get motivated to do security updates, leaving sites vulnerable to attack.

Extensibility - 9/10

Themes

Once again, its WordPress roots mean that bbPress borrows the templating system from the popular blogging software. Because of bbPress' youth, not as many themes are available for it as competitors, but there still are whole sites dedicated to offering themes for bbPress.

From a technical point of view, the templating system is solid, just like the one in WordPress. Piggybacking off WordPress' popularity should also lower the bar for theme developers who already work with WP to port styles over to the forum system, and create new themes specifically for bbPress.

Themes - 8/10

Overall

bbPress isn't perfect yet, and if you're serious about setting up a community where you want loads of features and familiarity for your users, you might want to steer clear in favour of more traditional forum solutions.

However, bbPress still offers a lot, and has huge potential to use the success of WordPress, and the things that are good about the shared platform, to become a serious player in the open source forum arena. When the project matures further, bbPress could easily give phpBB a good run for its money.

I'm going to stick with a 6.5 out of 10 overall score for now, as I think in most cases you'll want to use something more traditional, at least until bbPress becomes more developed and more popular. Watch this space, however.