Forum Software

[Andy]

I plan to launch a forum in a niche topic area and was all ready to go and got disappointed by the script I was trying out.

At first glance it seems amazing but it is too heavily influenced by the company brand integration. Also, the SEO is not so good where the Title text seems to be the same for any page on the site, even when you personally are seeing something else in your browser. The marketing is very slick, but the the end result seems to be more flashy than what you need to succeed.

http://www.boonex.com/products/orca/

So it seems to me like SMF is still king 

[Queen Bee]

The flashiness is probably not necessary. Load time is below that of the average forum. Also, Orca seems to have serious compatibility problems with Opera. Topics do not load in the browser, rather they show up as strings of code and error messages.

[Menard]

Anybody else notice that their favicon resembles an Illuminati symbol?

[Andy]

I went with SMF. But the default template seems difficult to customize. There are a lot of template files and they are still inserting inline style code with the PHP as well as using a styles.css file. They should separate the styles and template code. Also, there is a mixture of tables and divs used for the layout.

Also, they don't use heading tags at all in the default template.

For my customization, I changed mostly the colors and image elements used in the default template.

I noticed that 3rd party themes use a subset of the default templates so you are probably missing out on useful templates if you install a random theme.

[Menard]

I am curious...no, not about the Illuminati

I am going to be looking at forum software for the new site. Rather than having a single forum for the site, I am considering a separate forum for each topic area of the site, though they will all be connected by a central index. For each topical forum, I can just link to the specific forum and sub-topics page.

Being that the number of forums could get quite extensive, is it possible to have separate databases for each forum, or would it make any difference in access time?

Of course, this is just a consideration and I don't presently have any idea when it may come about.

[Andy]

With SMF you start with categories, then add forums to each category. That seems like what you want to do.

Managing many separate installations would be very time consuming I think.

You can use one database for multiple installations by specifying a different database prefix with each install.

MySQL is generally very fast so access time isn't usually a problem.

I used the KISS principle in my new forum: http://www.urgentclick.com/internet-marketing-forum/

Actually, there are only 2 boards that people are likely to post in. It will take a while for me to magnetize more people to post but they will come since I am posting the link to the site in many places where Internet Marketers hang out.

[Andy]

It would be nice to start a new forum coding project from scratch to create a cleaner separation of code from themes. WordPress have done a good job for the blogging platform apart from their handling of the sidebar list items where some formatting code is embedded in the core engine code and there are differences in the list structures.

I guess, for any script, you could write a program to re-format the output regardless of the forced formatting, but that would slow the rendering of pages down. I am thinking to use Curl to drive the script and extract the page contents and then have code to re-format the page to the browser. It would be tricky to do though since you would need a translation engine to recode the HTML which would identify the DIV ID's etc.

[m1k30rz]

Why don't you try phpBB3?? I've had many great sites with phpBB, The only other alternative I see is vBulletin when the sites bigger

[Andy]

Why don't you try phpBB3?? I've had many great sites with phpBB, The only other alternative I see is vBulletin when the sites bigger

Sorry I missed your post. I may look at PHPBB3 when I have free time. Now I went with SMF and it seems OK for now. Ideally I would like keyword URLs for posts but I can understand why this may be a problem for forums where there would be name clashes between posts.

I would like to code forum software, but I don't think it would be a good use of time. Maybe when I am retired