Forum looking beyond phpBB

Posted on June 8, 2016 • 2 minutes • 408 words • Suggest Changes

I have been a phpBB fan since phpBB 2, they are the standard for me, when it comes to forum software. However the phpBB 3 package is complex to work with, it has way too many buttons, the permission system is crazy deep and while phpBB 2 was a fun target for modding, the modding community did not take up phpBB 3 that good IMHO. With the release of phpBB 3.1 they took a different direction, they included a framework, Symfony -now this is personal- but I’m not a huge fan of Symfony either, I’m more of a CodeIgniter guy, though luck. Today I’m searching for alternatives to phpBB, while I am not sure I will find my next forum software package, one thing is certain, its goodbye to phpBB and its not-always-so-friendly community.

I don’t think its essential to be free or/and open-source, but its an advantage (one can test before having to commit) . I however require the software runs in a Linux environment so no windows-only tools. (PHP/MySQL is not a requirement, but its the easiest for me, and one of the most used languages) I did sorted this list, by how-much I like them after trying to install and playing with the demo. (allot of forums are missing, feel free to join in!)

Flarum

free, open-source
modern design
active development
build for current expectation : (single login, likes, …)
forget complex forms
wysiwyg editor

learning curve ?
beta
small dev. team (mostly written by 2 people)
-/+ uses composer, dependency manager for a forum (?) not sure if that is a good thing

Discourse