Six Forums - Fri, 8 Feb 2008

Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum.

1. The current forum software I use on my site is Broadboard, a VBScript ASP forum that has worked quite well. But it’s author stopped maintaining it several years ago, and it uses Microsoft Access as a database, which may limit it in the future. Also, it does not use CSS so would be difficult to adapt to the new site design
    
2. Then I thought about Simple Machines Forum, a full-featured free PHP-based forum. Lots of people like it and it has everything but the kitchen sink, but it felt bloaty to me.
    
3. I took a stab at Google Groups which didn’t look bad. But it wasn’t under my control and wouldn’t link into WordPress, and then I found out about
    
4. Vanilla - a plain vanilla standard-based standards-compliant Forum with plug-in capability
    
5. I started trying to integrate it with WordPress, but then it became obvious to try bbPress, the forum used at WordPress and developed with the same core code that WordPress uses. But bbPress appeared to be a bit too primitive. Then I found…
    
6. Simple Forum - an actual WordPress plugin. Just drop it in and it’s there. Full featured and 100% compatible and pre-integrated with WordPress. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been so impressed by a software package. The author’s site and his support and development of this package is a model for me to follow with Behold.

So hopefully this weekend, I’ll have the new Blog and new Forum all finished (and I will be transferring all my old blog entries and the forum posts over). Then I’ll make sure that my background scripts and integration with my Buy Now page works. If those have few problems, I may be able to get the new redesigned site up by end of next week. Then I’ll finally be able to get back to Behold development.

This new site has taken me 2 months since I announced it. I thought it would only take a few weeks, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I’ve learned a lot about CSS and new web technologies and PHP scripting and MySQL databases, which will benefit me as I move Behold along.