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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-my-people-post dept.

First time accepted submitter DustyMurray writes "I am considering adding forums to my website, and am just getting confused by all the options. My first reaction is always DIY. You get better website integration, and it looks and feels 100% how you want it to look and feel. However looking at things like phpBB and Vanilla forums, I will be hard pressed to build a better user experience in a reasonable amount of time. Also these out-of-the-box solutions seem to be shouting 'Easy to integrate with your website.' So, considering this, how easy are these ready build forums really to integrate? I want to be able to insert stuff on certain pages, so it's not either the forums, or my site... It must be a mix. I do not want a second login system on my site. And last but not least, I definitely don't want to have this typical generic look that most forums sport. Can all that be delivered with the out-of-the-box forums that exist today? Which one is the most flexible regarding these wishes?"

5 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. vBulletin by DevTecha · · Score: 5, Informative

    I would say that vBulletin is your best choice. It has a huge amount of features you're going to love.

    Seriously, building something like vBulletin would take you years with all the front-end and admin panel features. It is also customizable to every site so that it can look the same as your site (but maintains the usability users have adjusted to on other sites). This is also performance thing apart from features - you most likely lack the knowledge to make high performance forum as good as vBulletin guys have.

    I've seen large sites that have connected their website with vBulletin, so it is possible. Not only that, but vBulletin actually has vBulletin Connect that lets you build your website around vBulletin. Some CMS (Content Management Systems) also support vBulletin directly.

    One specific large site I use daily did convert from their proprietary system they had used for more than 10 years. vBulletin was their choice, and while it did take a few months to convert that old system, the forum now works much better and supports way more features that users like. If you are making a new site you can obviously do it correctly the first time and skip the conversion.
    If you are doing this as work for a professional site, I would stay away from phpBB and other free solutions. While it's possible to use them, you don't get any support and they're hard to integrate exactly the way you want to. They also tend to lack on the features that something like vBulletin has.

    vBulletin really is your best choice. It's a little pricy, but for what you get the price is more than justified.

    1. Re:vBulletin by JMJimmy · · Score: 5, Informative

      As a user I would say don't use vBulletin. Sure it has some great features, but I hate using it.

      phpBB has everything you need, a very active "addons" community, and is much nicer for users. Added benefit, it's free - takes about 10 minutes to get installed, and has enough features and options to keep you busy customizing/configuring for a while.

    2. Re:vBulletin by Cheech+Wizard · · Score: 5, Informative

      I would suggest that you really think about vBulletin and read about the history. It was great when Jelsoft owned it, but it was bought out by Internet Brands and is now a mess. The last "good" version was 3.8.7. Version 4 was a disaster. Version 5 is being sold and is in beta but it really sucks. vBulletin is no longer a "best choice". It was some years ago but these days it isn't. I've been running vBulletin forums since 2001 but stopped "upgrading" at 3.8.7. To make it worse, the Internet Brands people have terrible technical support and - Well, vBulletin used to be the "gold standard". Today, not by a long shot.

    3. Re:vBulletin by Thesis · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As a long time owner of a vB license, I second the motion to read about the history of vBulletin before making a decision to use their software. When IB bought Jelsoft, it went downhill rather quickly. Many would say, and I have to agree, that vB jumped the shark after the acquisition. Many of us who own and operate boards also agree that version 3.8.7 was the last good version. The management at Jelsoft/IB attempted to morph the software into a catchall social networking solution akin to Facebook, in my eyes anyway. Many of us who have or had "owned" licenses feel that we got screwed, for the terms in licensing changed dramatically beginning with version 4. It turned into a huge money grab in the eyes of many, including myself. Many customers went with other options, and some of us never updated beyond 3.8.7, and are looking for other solutions. Yes, I have tried versions 4 and 5, and they are horrid IMHO.

      It should also be mentioned that some key vB developers left the company as well, for they agreed with many of the customers at that time, that Jelsoft had lost its way. Those developers who left, started to build their own forum software solution from scratch, which is called XenForo ( http://xenforo.com/ ), and is offered to the public as a paid option to forum software. IB got quite pissy over this, and filed multiple court cases against them, which has thus far proved to be fruitless, and appears to be simply a way to make XenFro bleed financially through litigation. http://xenforo.com/community/threads/a-statement-regarding-the-current-litigation.7567/

      I will say that I personally do not think that XenFro is quite yet up to snuff, when compared to older versions of vB, or other paid solutions. I do hold hope that one day soon it will be.

  2. The Forum Matrix by thenendo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I recently had to select a forums solution for my company, and this site proved extremely useful: http://www.forummatrix.org/

    It catalogues tons of closed and open-source forum products coded by dozens of variables, and lets you compare them in a big matrix. Very useful if you have constraints/preferences like "works with SQL server" or "isn't PHP", etc.

    My main complaint about it is that some of the data are out-of-date, but it is still a great starting point.