Forum Software Showdown
I just set up a message board for a client. There are at least 20 usable products out there: the awesome Forum Matrix solves that in a hurry. View a list of options pared down by your requirements, then view a list of the most important criteria to you (from a list of something like 50).
In this case, vBulletin was the winner. vBulletin is a very nice product, but the competition wasn’t nearly as strong as I’d anticipated after first viewing the size of the field. One similarly-priced solution has their demo offline until some time next year, with their site claiming it’s coming in October. phpBB has a lot of theoretical power from user-created mods, but they’re hit and miss (the file attachment mod is gold, but calendar options are lacking).
vBulletin was easy to install, has a great calendar, supports archiving, and is just extremely full-featured. It costs $160, which it quickly justifies when I compare its setup time with the work I spent on other solutions. People with different requirements might like phpBB or some other free option fine, though, so hit up that aforementioned matrix.
December 1st, 2006 at 8:59 pm
ForumMatrix: There are a few notably missing entries, Slashcode and Scoop, which makes me wonder how they’re limiting their criteria and what other suitable systems might also be missing.
December 2nd, 2006 at 7:18 pm
It’s solely for forum software. I can’t find where they describe their criteria, but neither Scoop nor Slashcode self-describe as forum software. The ForumMatrix entries I saw were pretty squarely in the traditional forum realm: there are posts; typically ordered by recency; most users simply make topics and reply to posts. It may be narrow, but I think the assumption is that by the time you get to ForumMatrix, you’ve already decided against using some sort of more advanced CMS.