[Burt Adsit]

Wardeh, I’ve looked at bbpress, simple:press and phpbb3. I installed, configured and toyed with all of them. IMHO bbpress is the best of the lot. It has user integration with mu, it’s fairly easy to learn and skin and it is going to be more and more tightly integrated with mu.

simple:press is just that, simple. If all you want is a quick forum component that integrates tightly with mu, it’s great. I just don’t see it going anywhere. My forums are extremely important to my site. I’m going to spend a lot of time and effort configuring and extending that component. My users are going to get used to whatever forum I hook up. I’d like the software that I’m working with to be around next year and have some kind of future.

phpbb3 is very powerful. It’s the top of the line when it comes to configuration options and sheer volume of features. If phpbb3 don’t got it, it doesn’t exist as an option or feature anywhere. It is possible to integrate with mu. I had it running that way. It’s main drawback is that it has so many options and features that it’s confusing for the end user. It’s daunting to visit a phpbb3 forum and see all the little buttons, options, links, notifications, doodads, geegaws and flashy things. I get confused, lost and frustrated myself on those. My experience has been that normal people who aren’t whiz bang computer geeks are frightened and confused by it.

bbpress also has the concept of plugins to extend it’s feature set and change it’s behavior. If I want to add or change a feature in phpbb3 then I have to modify the source code to get it.