Hi, I need some information from forums owners who have used phpBB2 and SMF Discussion Boards/Forums.... Which one is better and why?....If you also noticed a feature found in one of them, and missed in the other please mention too. I need your opinion in which one is better to run a forum, and your experience with them. Thanks in advance, Roseate
You should of done a search, there are hundreds of these topics here. There is no best software, some have features the other don't and vise versa. If you are looking for opinions, well heres mine. Go with phpBB, I like teh style allot better and I love how easy it is to learn to manage. I have never personally used SMF, and the only thing I have against is its look. However nothing a new skin cannot change. Theres always phpBB 3, which is the new version of phpBB 2. It as allot more features, and is now up to date with other softwares. With a good style, and perhaps some slight MODs you will have a great forum with phpBB 3.
Thanks for the reply.... My options are just those two, because my host support them (ie; I can easily install them with one click! ) I am with you about the look of SMF, so I was more to phpBB.... Have also noticed the new version - phpBB 3 is out, I don't know if my host will update it their so I can easily install it?....hope they will soon. Thanks for the info.
They will probably wait a while untill most people have started to transfer to phpBB 3, there are still many more versions to come out. If I was you I would choose phpBB. Maybe you could set up two test forums, one of each. Check the style, and the administration out. Then decide what you prefer yourself, then deleted the boards and choose your software then make your proper forum. You won't lose anything, becasue you won't need to add anything to the test forums, its just for you to check what you feel best with.
I used PHPBB2 for some time and many of the SMF skins are ugly but if you look around the SMF site there are some nice themes. although i haven't tried every PHPBB mod (and there are so many for BB), the nice thing about SMF is there are many ssi_ functions that have prepackaged for you--so it's very easy to integrate recent posts, recent topics, and a forum log in on ANY page in your site. once i started using the kind of integration that SMF easily allows, the number of people in my forum has been skyrocketing .
That's a good post. Most people go for looks and supposed easyness and choose PHPBB2. They then find that besides being a forum it doesn't do much, not to forget how targetted it is for so called hackers. With SMF, you can put almost any part of your forum on any page of your site and as you pointed out, it does increase membership and activity quite well. You can find some generic SMF themes @ http://custom.simplemachines.org/themes/ I prefer Bloc's themes though @ http://www.tinyportals.net/index.php?cat=5741
Since they are both free, the best thing would be to test both of them and evaluate them for yourself to see which best fits your needs. Theres a feature comparison @ http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/phpBB+SMF