Advice on what forum to install. Free, secure, and a lot of mods.

I host vBulletin now, but I do want to change.

After using vBulletin for personal uses(chatting with friends,etc.) I have found out that their are not a lot of mods for vBulletin. The best mods are made by third parties, and expensive.

Also, vBulletin is quite expensive.
If I feel that a recent version of vB comes out, and I like it; I will switch.

For now
Does anyone have any forums they recommend?
I want a secure forum.
A lot of mods and hacks.
pretty cool themes, especially technology themes.

Good administrator panel. a lot of choices I can do with users.
Maybe the administrator panel of phpBB. A LOT of options and settings.

I will also want to restrict the moderators and administrators to certain parts of the admin panel.
Advice?

 

It doesn't matter what your friends want, you should ask your members what software they'd prefer the forum to be on - after all it's not your friends who you need to impress, it's the members.

There are hundreds of mods for vBulletin - http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=198 , perhaps the reason there aren't as many mods as competing forum software is because vBulletin has pretty much got everything you need as default.

vBulletin is the way forward, although if you've got your heart set on another forum software and want a wide range of MODs, use something open source like phpBB. Just bare in mind with phpBB, it makes simple tasks such as installing mods time consuming, and boring.

 

If you want to start free, i would suggest Simple Machines Forum (http://www.simplemachines.org/)
If you need any help installing a system, either it VB, IPB, PHPBB, i can help you, pm me if you need.

 

SMF is a good free solution easy to modify aswell

 

For me SMF seems "unfinished", like the IP logging tool, little things that make it look horrible.

Although it does have some nice themes, from dziner.

Anyways i personally think phpBB is great, it's hard to customize but there's alot of mods for it

 

The only problem in phpbb to install a mod many times we have to do manual edits that sucks

 

Well atleast you learn something. It is annoying but despite what people say it actually is easy, although with everyone saying it's hard, people think the same also, for a beginner i must say it would be hard though.

 

Not really. To be honest the only thing you learn when installing a MOD on phpBB3 is how to copy / paste. People who say they learn PHP by installing a MOD are talking nonsense.

It's never hard to install a MOD, beginners are just intimidated by having to edit the core files directly. Just because there isn't a pretty interface with an upload / Install button makes people freak out