Aura Forums

Ed is setting up a website, and wishes to include a forum section. Would he be better using an external source like eazyboard, store bought software, or programming it himself?

I guess this question is more or less directed at Chewi, since he is our ROOT admin. But can anyone shed more light on this please?

Coding a good forum is hard. Even I wouldn't do it unless you paid me a lot. If he also wants a website, he might as well host his own forum rather than use ezboard or proboards or any of that crap. Most half decent hosts support PHP, which most forum software uses. Not all forum software costs either. phpBB is free, for instance. Version 2 wasn't all that hot but version 3 is rather nice. I'm still thinking about migrating to it.

yea phpbb is probably ur best choice dont use the free hostin ones like proboards they suck major ass. Theres no harm in hostin ur own

Thanks guys. That's all we needed to know

Phpbb3 has the added bonus of looking pretty and not beign a complete cunt that bb2 was, in order to do anything remotely easy. There are a couple of other 'free' options (require hosting with some sort of Sql database) SMF is gaining popularity.

http://www.simplemachines.org/

I use SMF...sort of

We're using phpBB3 and I fucking hate it. But it's got all the functionality you need.

Well Ed was trying it this morning (phpbb3). He doesn't like that much, he's having problems changing the way it looks. At the moment he is playing with Fusion.

Yeah, that's one of the many reasons I hate it. But, I guess, I'm just too used to vB.

Teehee it's not just Ed then.

phpbb: the dogs nuts for functioanlity but dont even dream of changing the layout unless you're a skilled php programmer.

php-Fusion: less power and slightly easier to modify but it's still got me stumped.

about to try PHORUM which claims to be html based for easy editing. ill let you know how it goes!

I hate skinning forums in general. It's a pain in the ass with any of them, especially with IPB (this one). It's not the coding that bothers me, just the fact that the templates are always overly complex (tables within tables within...) and changing one thing usually changes something else you didn't want at the same time. With Marna's forum, I just picked the Carbon theme (sexy), swapped a few images, and that was us.

I think me and mik hacked at this one for 3 days before calling it quits.
thats how we do just about everything tho.

I wouldn't say you need to be a programmer to skin phpBB. It's just shit, nothing is where it should be and you have to relearn where stuff is "kept" and thus is takes you three hours to make a usegroup have bold usernames and the way you actually ended up doing that was to copy a usergroup that already has bold usernames and rename the fucking thing.

Yeah

Actually, This particular version (WolvenKaos2) we couldn't be arsed, Matt fixed it from the old version, so it was half way workable.


Skinning is akward because as others have said, they think it's fucking hilarous to move and rename fucking everything every new version. So you basically have to relearn everything. I wouldn't say you need to know alot of php at all, unless your trying to add something to it, a skin requires some basic CSS knowledge and a meteric fuck ton of patience.