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How Do The Various Web-Forum Engines Compare?
psyklohps asks: "I work at a local newspaper in Dover, DE. My boss is trying to setup a forum based site that will cover local news and get responses form the community. Unfortunately bosses are not very smart, and he is trying to develop the site from scratch. So I feel that I should tell him about the forum-based-code engines that are free. Of course my first choice would be Slashcode, but after looking on Google I found alot of different engines. PHPNuke, Zope, Squish.dot, and others that I have forgotten are available. What are the pros and cons for each of them?"
If you don't need authentication my choice would be phpweblog.
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
Warning: this is a plug; I am a member of the PHPSlash core team. Check out PHPSlash. The current release doesn't do users or moderation, but it *does* have templates, an extensible class library (in OOP PHP), session management and some features that I believe are unique, like the ability to file stories in more than one sections or topics. PHPSlash used to be a port of Slashcode, but it's now a 100% clean-room implementation, written from the ground up for PHP.
Slashdot had a discussion about this a little over a year ago, much of it is still relevant.
I needed something, preferably PERL or PHP based with a MySQL backend for a UNIX admin forum I'm starting...
I checked out Smallpig...to me code is ideally like GNU code - configure, make, make install is all that should be needed on normal, major systems. Smallpig is far from this. I didn't really like the way it was coded, although a lot of the features are nice.
I like Slashcode, especially for the karma system, but it again seemed a bit much for what I wanted
I went with Phorum - I'd been happy with PHP since my exposure to it. It's simple, yet does the job. It's small enough that I can expand in the direction I want, yet big enough that it does most of what I want, I don't have to start from scratch.
A friend of mine and I have set up ~5 slashcode[1] sites now (geekaustin.org is an example; they're all hosted off the same box). The first one you do is a royal with cheese pain in the ass. The engine is very flexible, but it'll probably take you a good month or two to get it up and become familiar with the inner workings.
So for a quick fix, my .02 USD is to avoid Slashcode and go with something simpler.
Just to add another name to the pot, Glasscode (java servlet based) was released yesterday or the day before. I'd provide a link here but if you can't look for the story link that's still more than likely on the front page yer just being laaaa-zeee. ;-)
Good luck!
[1] the mod_perl/shtml/MySQL monstrosity that powers this website among (many) others. it works but on the inside it ain't pretty...
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Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Aunt Mable sez: "If you dont' have much processor power go for something in Perl that writes static files when required. Me? I would write my own flat weblog in PHP/MySQL. Linear aside from stories."
She continues: "...the most important bit is your HTML which when generated usually looks like arse. Don't make yours bloated and look like arse. Don't"
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
http://glasscode.half-empty.org/gcservlet/LoadPage .
I haven't tried it out yet, but plan to before the weekend is out. Wife and kids catching the flu have postponed my tests so far this weekend. Some things take priority.
The next question to ask, is what is your box like? Most of the webforum software out there seems to require diddling with Apache (or whatever you use for a web server). Installation of almost all of them is a job for the brave and reasonably experienced.
everything you need. php(Reactor).