Best PHP forum

Do you know how many forum softwares currently exist in the market? 57, and counting. I was recently being asked to source for a forum software and it was quite a challenging task recommending the best php forum. After several days of researching on the topic, I am presenting the finding here for those who are interested.

This review is by no means exhaustive or based upon technical facts. Writing detail technical analysis and comparisons are no longer effective these days as it will probably become irrelevant and obsolete one month after it was published. However, in pointing out availability of resources online I hope to help speed up your own discovery process, which is the end objective of this blog.

Wikipedia maintains a comprehensive list and objective comparisons of Internet forum software. I love wikipedia, you can find almost anything there. It provides a very good starting point for your topic of interest. Knowing what are available helps narrow down the search.

No matter how much feature a software can offer, the fastest way of assessing the useability of the tool is to listen to existing users’ experience. If you google “best php forum”, you’ll come across plenty of threads debating on the subject. After (patiently) spending hours of reading I was able to uncover some constructive criticisms which allows me to further shortlist to popular few.

With the final few candidates, you can proceed to do a feature comparisons if functionality is so much of a concern. This part is easy (surprisingly). Hop over to www.forummatrix.org, select your candidates, and click compare.

And finally, a research is never complete without seeing the live demo itself. The hassle of this used to be you need to download, go through the (sometime tedious) installation process to see how it actually works. Not anymore. You can simply head over to www.forum-software.org for a quick test drive of what’s in store. Forum-Software also provides additional review and rating on ease of installation, administration, forum use which can be helpful to the decision making process.

With those (quick) research, I’ve came to the following conclusion.

And The Recommendation

1. For Commercial Forum

• Invision Power Board (IPB)
• vBulletin

2. For Opensource Forum (free)

• Simple Machines
• PhpBB

There is no single best forum that meets everyone’s need and your requirements may dictate the final choice of tool. The above 4 are my final candidates and I will continue evaluating them on the next level. I am looking for a convergance of forum with blogging and gallery functionality. Imaging this,

• homepage appears in blog style with recent posting by editors (i.e. WordPress)
• fully featured image gallery with auto-resize, slide show etc (i.e. Gallery2)
• a structured forum to discussion among the community (Simple Machines)

This is where the real challenge lies; to find all 3 pieces of software that can work harmoniously together with minimal integration works.

Bloghelper’s recent post of Integrating a Forum with WordPress is an educational read if you want to integrate wordpress with forum.