NYCPHP Meetup

[Jayesh Sheth]

Hi everyone,

Here is a brief follow-up on PHP forums.

I followed my curiousity today, and checked out the code of a handful of
open source PHP bulletin board systems.
The ones I checked out were: Bee Hive Forum, MiniBB, W-Agora, smf,
l-forum, and Phorum. 

I had used MiniBB in the past, and it works well from a user's point of
view, and its templates were easy to customize. I had never really
looked into its code, which is not commented at all, and frankly almost
obfuscated. (Sorry that came out so harsh!) It's a neat piece of
software to use, but heaven help me if I were asked to customize it at
the code (as opposed to template) level.

I briefly looked through the other packages, and none of them, except
Phorum, seemed to have been coded well. I checked out Phorum on a lark,
having remembered it from years ago, when Mozillazine used its version 2
software. (Mozillazine has since moved to phpBB.) Phorum is now up to
version 5. A lot / most of its code seems to be functionized, or uses
functions. I like that! I tried out a demo at opensourcecms.com, and it
seems okay. Best of all, http://forums.mysql.com/ seems to use it. There
are some glaring user interface boo-boos: for example, in order to
register as a new user, you have to click on 'log in'. This error could
be easily fixed. They even have a developer blog, and their site has a
tidy and easy-to-navigate feel to it. Check it out:
http://www.phorum.org .

I have been wanting to check out Fudforum too. I wish someone would make
a zip or tar.gz file of its uncompressed sources so I could check it
out.

Best regards,

- Jay
- Jay