punbb and my experience

So I created http://www.animalcrossingwildworld.com and needed a quick forums since the site was getting a lot of uniques fast..it's up to 800 per day now and growing at alarming pace. I didn't want a bulky phpbb installation so I tried punbb which I heard was a small footprint...and it is. My first impression was very good. It was a 300k download and installed very very well. The integration was a breeze...it has a main.tpl which you can edit to create the wrapper for your forums. I just took the code from my front end and stuck it around the main.tpl. It was that simple. Next I needed to change the layout of punbb to match the site. That was even simpler. All of the punbb layout is css. Took me less than 10 minutes to get it how it is now. The admin side of punbb is nice and simple but has solid features. I quickly decided to check out some mods because plain vanilaa installs are just not enough normally.

Mods for punbb are written much like phpbb mods so installation for me was familiar feeling and very fast.

My first mod was a google adsense mod which is pretty easy to install and has a plugin type interface in the admin to make custom changes to the adsense. It's pretty good mod and clicks were coming in immediately.

Next I tried the SEO rewrite mod...worked very well..however to prevent duplicate links I had to make 3 file changes so guests do not get a link when the date of last post is displayed. This mod took a bit longer but well worth it.

After the SEO I added a sitemap. SUPER EASY! Took me 2 minutes. Basically just upload. Check it out for yourself. This version was written to match the SEO mod.
http://www.animalcrossingwildworld.com/forums/sitemap.php

Then I added a Private Message mod which is excellent. Punbb doesn't have a PM system and I didn't add this for over 2 weeks but finally decided to add it. Those changes were simple and the instructions perfect.

So far I am very happy with it. phpbb lately seems to just give me headaches with the updates so I am looking for an alternative and punbb could be useful for quick and small projects.

As of this post google has yet to index my pages but the site only launched on Dec 5th with the forums being opened on the 15th. The SEO was just last week I believe.

Thanks for reading.

 

nice for you and your site also loooks awesome.. just visited

 

Thanks...it's grown a lot in 1 month.

 

wow... very nice.

You're right about phpbb and the headaches... wow.