Years ago I started a forum. I went with phpBB and it was okay, but soon moved it to Invision. My board grew. And Invision became a "for pay" software. I was okay with that. But eventually I moved my site to a network that used their own proprietary software. So I'm out of the loop on things right now.
But I'm wanting to start up a new community and will probably need to start w/ a free software at first again. I've not had a lot of time to spend w/ MyBB yet, but know that MyBB, SMF, and phpBB seem to be the top dogs of the freebies.
What is it about MyBB that makes it your favorite? What features or processes sold you on it? And what do you see in other software that you wish MyBB would add soon? It seems I'm really between MyBB and SMF right now.
I know that the eventual solution is to do an install of each and tinker under the hood and behind the scenes some. But just wondering your opinion.
Thanks so much for your help.
(2008-11-12, 01:24 PM)StateDOG Wrote: [ -> ]... the eventual solution is to do an install of each and tinker under the hood and behind the scenes some.
Unfortunately, that's the only thing you can do! If you feel more comfortable using one over the other then it's obvious which one you like more...
At the minute, I'm using MyBB in a few projects. I'm an Invision-tard really... so it's been quite hard to use something else! The latest project I'm working on is
MyBB as an Intranet. IMHO, if you read through that topic you'll see how easy it is to customize MyBB and integrate it into your website/community. That's why I picked it - it's scalable, secure and user friendly.
Downsides are the "community". There's a very limited amount of mods/plugins, skins and themes, but normally you can get whatever you want if you look hard enough. The MyBB forums are technically more active than SMF, and although support hasn't been that good recently it's improving quite fast!
I can't think of anything I want put into MyBB that I can't already have as a mod/plugin, or as custom coding. I've been using Invision for years, but I really think this software is as good as it gets for free forums.
I'm moving to either MyBB, SMF or phpBB in March, from a closed source forum hoster who closes down in March (RapidForum.com). We are still comparing various forum solutions and so far, MyBB is the favourite.
What is it about MyBB that makes it the favourite?
Mainly the lack of alternatives. We had a look at a lot of software, and unfortunately, many Open Source projects are in a sad state. Some are unmaintained so they support only old MySQL / PHP, or badly coded so they only support one specific version. Then they are buggy to no end and make mistakes even when posting in ASCII (for example IceBB was horrible). I should add that our forum is multilingual, i.e. solid UTF-8 support is a requirement.
Out of all softwares we selected, only MyBB, SMF and phpBB3 are still standing.
phpBB3 is a mess. It's hard to use, you need to search around for options, it takes ages to create a forum structure with proper permissions. A lot of things are overengineered (PM system) and yet don't work anyway (tells you 2 new messages when you login, when you click on it, it resets back to 0 new messages even though you haven't read any message yet etc.). Plus I don't like the looks of it and the code is not easy to understand, therefore I can't fix bugs myself.
SMF seems to be a solid solution. There are some quirks in the interface too - when adding a new forum, it always tries to insert it on top, instead of appending at bottom - to make it the bottom, you have to first select the last forum in the list, and then switch from 'insert before...' to 'insert after...'. It's easier to create the forum on top and then move it to the bottom than creating it in the bottom in the first place. The SMF code seems very nice, everything is documented.
MyBB was easiest to install, easiest to create the forum structure in. The community seems huge, there are dozens of sites, in my case this forum here as well as a forum in my native language (german) over at mybboard.de. You have questions, you post them, you get a reply in a very short amount of time. The Admin CP is by far the best, it even has a search option for configuration settings. The code is good, easy to understand, and it's documented, no complaints there. Within the first week of using MyBB I already wrote a plugin for it that changes a core function of MyBB, without any special PHP or MyBB knowledge. All in all, MyBB came just with the best default theme and most natural feel regarding usage, so it's the favourite at the time being.
MyBB is not perfect. In the short time I tested MyBB, I already discovered several bugs (which is also part the reason why I wrote a plugin). The bug forum here feels suboptimal to me, I'm more used to real bugtrackers. Here I had bug reports moved to the general support forum section or to the bogus section with either no comment or without the dev even looking at my proposal. I had to keep nagging them, I'm sorry.
Then there are some design choices in MyBB that I don't like. MyBB uses XHTML which is unfortunately a poor design choice for the WWW in general. While the PHP code is nice and documented, it also uses tabs for indenting, and even tabs for whitespace. Which makes it unreadable on any terminal that does not have a tab width of 4. So I have to run a script on the code that replaces tabs with spaces first, which makes the code much easier to handle.
I have loads of minor nitpicks with MyBB, and hardly any with SMF. But that's not because SMF is better... no, MyBB is better, and I find the nitpicks with MyBB because I'm doing much more thorough tests with MyBB at the moment than I do with SMF (in my MyBB testforum there are already well over 200 postings, in the SMF forum there are only 7).
PS: @Tom.M: I read your intranet showcase a while ago, very interesting project.
(2008-11-12, 01:54 PM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]...
Then there are some design choices in MyBB that I don't like. MyBB uses XHTML which is unfortunately a poor design choice for the WWW in general. While the PHP code is nice and documented, it also uses tabs for indenting, and even tabs for whitespace. Which makes it unreadable on any terminal that does not have a tab width of 4. So I have to run a script on the code that replaces tabs with spaces first, which makes the code much easier to handle.
...
Globally, I agree with your post but have some question especially on the quoted paragraph.
- What the problem with XHTML, what is better?
- You don't mean to say that spaces is better, right?
(Tabs are more convenient than spaces when using a normal code editor + tab is one character while 3 spaces are 3, a small influence on performance/bandwith + you'll never be able to satisfy all the world)
XHTML is the future of the web so deal with it. You can do more with XHTML than with HTML, and it's much much cleaner with a standard of lowercase rather than MuLtiCAsE that HTML is.
And it seperates the presentation of HTML.
Well if you want to compare forumsofts you don't have to install them either.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?o...Itemid=159
I like to modifying template.
Between PHPBB and SMF, MyBB got my score!
and the other is CPU load, average MyBB lower than SMF for my big forum.
(2008-11-12, 04:29 PM)dvb Wrote: [ -> ]What the problem with XHTML, what is better?
For me, writing good and clean HTML is the way to go. I know this is a lost cause so I won't discuss it any further. This page pretty much sums up my opinion on xhtml:
http://www.webdevout.net/articles/beware-of-xhtml
Quote:(Tabs are more convenient than spaces when using a normal code editor + tab is one character while 3 spaces are 3, a small influence on performance/bandwith + you'll never be able to satisfy all the world)
Spaces are good. With spaces your code looks the same everywhere you go.
Tabs are evil because there is no standard for tabs. Many systems show tabs as 8 spaces wide. Others use 4 spaces. Others set their editor so a tab stands for an arbitrary number of spaces. No one can read what you write with tabs unless he uses the same tab width as you do.
Editor convenience: In a good editor, using spaces should not be any more inconvenient than using tabs, the editor should abstract away the tabs vs. spaces differences from you. I can edit tabbed code with no problem BUT I have to set the tab width first for every file or store that information somewhere in the file (in a header comment), that is annoying, spaces are much easier to use.
Influence on performance/bandwidth: Zero. There is zero advantage in this. A parser does not take any more time to read spaces than it needs time to read tabs. If that would make any difference in performance you would strip all unnecessary comments and documentation out of the source code, as it takes up tons of more space than tabs or spaces together. There is zero advantage in bandwidth - users do not download PHP code, they download HTML output of said PHP code. And most webservers do compressed transfers (GZip) where you lose even the few bytes spaces vs. tabs difference. And again, if that'd make any difference in performance you'd strip out all unnecessary whitespace / indentation from the HTML source since it's not required for a page to be displayed.
(2008-11-12, 01:54 PM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]The bug forum here feels suboptimal to me, I'm more used to real bugtrackers. Here I had bug reports moved to the general support forum section or to the bogus section with either no comment or without the dev even looking at my proposal. I had to keep nagging them, I'm sorry.
We receive too many reports to perform a in-depth analysis and report on each and every "problem" someone says is a bug. I'd say about every other bug report is either posted in the Bug Reports forum when it isn't a bug, or the problem is bogus for various reasons. All of our team either go to school or work and have busy lives apart from MyBB, so we can't be there to provide a in-depth explanation every single time.
(2008-11-12, 01:54 PM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]Then there are some design choices in MyBB that I don't like. MyBB uses XHTML which is unfortunately a poor design choice for the WWW in general.
And we can rub two pieces of wood together until it starts a fire, but are we still in the stone age?
(2008-11-12, 01:54 PM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]While the PHP code is nice and documented, it also uses tabs for indenting, and even tabs for whitespace. Which makes it unreadable on any terminal that does not have a tab width of 4. So I have to run a script on the code that replaces tabs with spaces first, which makes the code much easier to handle.
Not sure how something you can't see creates that many problems. In fact the whole point of indenting is to make the code easier to read and it's in our development standards to indent. Obviously the extraneous indenting is not intentional but most non-stone age editors automatically indent to where you previously indented in the last line of code.
Also not sure which terminal/editor your using because all the ones I've used are just fine. Maybe you should consider something better?
From my point of view, XHTML is stone age and HTML is the better solution. Same with tabs vs. spaces. And you can see tabs if they cause whitespace to go horribly wrong. As for terminal / editors, I use Linux, nano, vim, emacs, the usual suspects. But this is getting off topic, MyBB is still the best board software I found so far.