I've used phpBB2, SMF and tested both phpBB3 and IPB.
phpBB2 is the WORST option if you don't like the idea of hacking your software to pieces just to make it do simple things which the others do out of the box. This isn't the programs own fault, it is very old and it was quite high tech back in it's time. However phpBB2 does have one huge advantage over all of it's rivals and that is it's utterly enormous range of themes, mods and hacks to make it do whatever you could possibly want.
SMF has been the king of the freebie forum software for a wee while now. It's a fork of the old Yabb forum and has firmly stomped on phpBB2. It does have a poor selection of themes unfortunately and I've been having an awful time trying to theme it lately as the default theme is dog awful, nested tables and all sorts of tag soup polluting the code. They do have a good set of Mods available for it though, nothing like as many as phpBB2, but you don't need many as the software is quite well kitted out straight out of the box. It is also very easy to integrate the software with an existing website through the use of it's SSI.php file which allows easy integration of forum information on non-forum pages. SMF is also considered to be one of the most spam proof forums available, partly through it's use of advanced spam prevention methods, but also because it isn't heavily used so the spam bot makers have been targetting it as much as the more popular forum softwares.
phpBB3 is the much needed successor to phpBB2. It's currently in an extended RC stage but will hopefully be released properly within the next few months. Since it is brand new there are very few Mods for it yet and next to no themes. The default theme however is one of the rare fully semantical forum themes and the first one to come as the default with a forum.
Hopefully the phpBB3 Mod makers will be working over time to bring phpBB3 up to the level of SMF and perhaps even surpass it.
IPB is a paid system. I tried it briefly but didn't see any advantages over SMF so I ditched it.
VBulletin is the undisputed king of forums and is used here on the Developers Tutorials site. However I haven't seen any real reason to use it yet. There isn't anything that VBulletin can do (that I'd like to use) which SMF can't do without a few simple modifications. The main advantage of VBulletin over SMF I guess is that they have a broader selection of off the shelf themes. But you can always make your own SMF theme if you want anyway, albeit SMF isn't the easiest to theme as I mentioned earlier.
SMF2.0 is likely to be realsed later this year. From what I've heard/seen it isn't any huge improvement over SMF1.1.x, but hopefully it will feature a massively improved default theme/template system to make custom theming a lot simpler.
|
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
