Choosing Forum Software

I am looking at a new project in the coming weeks that will involve a discussion forum. This means that I can start completely from scratch and choose the forum software that is the best fit for the project. Of course I am a cheapskate so forget using paid forum software.

This means I will be going with a free forum platform. There are several to choose from and up until a couple of days ago, I had pretty much decided to go with phpBB3 because it had the best feature set. Previously I had gone with SMF as the best free, but the features that phpBB3 offers had left SMF 1.1 back in the dark ages.

That was until SMF released a beta of their 2.0. It’s still a beta and not quite ready for production, but I could start developing around it. Maybe its stability would be good enough to run a small but growing forum. It’s definitely something that has made me think a lot about. I guess I won’t know until I decide to put both through some trials.

More on that later.

Tags: forums, phpbb3, smf