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.

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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.

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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:

Read the rest of Open Source Forum Shootout - Phorum