I have been using Plone for my Dataface web site for the past couple of years. Finally, the slow performance, resource heaviness, and lack of a decent forum product forced me to move the site out of Plone and into PHP. This move was inevitable since Dataface itself is a PHP framework so it would only make sense to eventually host the site using Dataface.

When I first set up the site I wasn’t sure how it would be used mostly. I knew I would need a forum for support but I didn’t realize just how important the forum would be. Over 80 percent of traffic was directed to the forum, and Plone’s forum (Ploneboard) was barely up to the challenge as it was lacking quite a few standard forum features (like email notifications), and the community didn’t seem to be too interested in pushing the development along (there is no money in developing message forums).

With the new site, I had a few choices for the forum:
1. I could build my own using Dataface. This would be pretty easy to do, but I figured the time would be better spent on other things especially if I could be a pre-built forum with all the features ready to go.

2. I could use one of the 2 main commercial PHP bulletin board products (VBulletin, and Invision Power Board). These are definitely full featured, and the prices are pretty good, but I kind of wanted to stay open source through and through for this open source project.

3. I could use PHPBB.

PHPBB is the most well known open source PHP bulletin board systems and it has been around for a while. I have used it for web sites in the past, but have had bad experiences, as every one of my past PHPBB sites has been hacked repeatedly. I have heard that it has improved, however, and that the new version is much more cleanly designed. So I am reluctantly giving it another shot.

The Good …

Installation

PHPBB installed without a hitch. I was able to write a simple PHP script to import all of my old Ploneboard posts into PHPBB so that I wouldn’t have to lose the wealth of knowledge.

Performance

It is much faster than Plone (it has less to do), and the refined features (e.g. email notifications) that it has built up over the years should help the community to grow faster and stay stronger. Looking forward to it.

The Bad …

Spam

Within 8 hours of installing PHPBB, the board was being spammed. I found out that Guest posting is enabled by default, so I figured that one was my fault. I turned off guest posting. Within mere hours the board was receiving more spam. Even with PHPBB’s captcha text spammers seem to be able to create accounts and spam the board. This is a symptom of being popular, so spammers have spent lots of time writing bots specifically for this type of board.

There are MODs you can get to try to prevent spam even more, but I think I will rig up my own solutions so that the board can’t be spammed by standard PHPBB methods (they will at least have to come up with some custom spam stragegies for my site if they want to spam me).

Can’t rebulit search index

Because I imported all of my old posts directly into the database, PHPBB didn’t have a chance to index them for searching. So the search doesn’t work. The problem is that PHPBB doesn’t come with an administrator function to rebuild the search index. You have to install a MOD for this. IMHO such an integral part of a forum should be included as part of the main distribution.

The Ugly …

No Modules, only Modifications

One of the exciting things about using a product with a large community is that it has lots of add-ons available in the form of modules. PHPBB has an entire database of MODs that can be installed. The trouble is that in PHPBB, a MOD is a Modification, and not a Module. I.e. Installing a MOD entails following instructions to actually change the templates or source code of PHPBB. From a developer’s perspective this isn’t too good as it doesn’t take long before your forum is unmanageable and un-upgradeable.

I figured that such a large project surely would have developed a module system by now (so that you can install and uninstall modules without changing the main application. I figured wrong.

Summary

So far it doesn’t seem too bad. I’ll have to make a few customizations to shore up security and add a few features that I want, but all-in-all I’m pretty happy with what I see so far with PHPBB.