Forest of Forum Software

Posted by santosj on May 23, 2006

Or… Why can’t coders work together on similar projects?

Lack of Built-in Features

I have to choose between either buying a license for a well developed and some would say bloated package or a free package that may lack some features. I look at the free packages since I’m tight on my budget and I have no idea if anyone is going to even use the software.

IPB sucks major ass!

After looking at Simple Machines Forum I think it is pretty cool with nice User Panel features and Admin Panel features with a great design. However, I recently looked at the features for phpBB 3.0 and I was impressed. They had the features I want out of box and I can’t wait until others update their phpBB packages to it. However, it seems that the final is quite a ways away.

phpBB 3.0 is almost to Beta 1, but it probably won’t be so until late this year with the final not coming out for another year or so. The development of SMF is a little better.

What is wrong with working together?

If SMF and phpBB combined forces along with other ‘big’ free, opensourced forum packages, then they could add features quicker and have a large audience of coders for support. However, the design and coding practices would keep them apart. I would however like to see a unified forum package built from all of the coders for which they branched off on their individual packages.

In that way, if I create a MOD for phpBB, I wouldn’t have to rewrite it to work with SMF. Each of the forum coders would maintain the ‘core’ forum package implementing major request features and since it would be open source and open license, I could create my own team to develop a forum off of it. It would also allow each of the ‘big’ forum coders to keep their own design practices and work together as a whole to create a better overall package for every free and open source forum.

This would never happen, but it would be awesome if it did. I suppose competition would see that whichever package is developed faster and has a larger user base behind will succeed. I think it would be a better usage of time if all of the open source forum package coders worked together instead of constantly reinventing the wheel for every feature.

It would require a group of coders to maintain the core base and make decisions on what features are implemented at the base. Those who take up that role would have to be well known or at least respected as coders for anyone to listen or take them seriously.

I like phpBB but…

It isn’t coded for PHP 5 for interfaces, abstraction, and SPL. I looked at the database alone and I see many areas that could use an interface and I have a few places where I would add plugable methods for classes. It does not seem that the development group would have the resources to recode the forum to those specifications or at least not until PHP 6 comes out. When PHP 6 comes out, I do hope they do recode the forum for that. It would be easier if they started implementing PHP 5 features now for when PHP 6 does come out. Unicode support is going to rock for translation purposes.

I like SMF but…

Classes anyone?

The usage of functions is nice, but I like classes since it keep the functionality together without having to worry about register() and register2() and what each of them mean.

$registerClass = new Register; // constructor calls begin and if it does then begin method won’t do anything.
$registerClass->begin(); // register()
$registerClass->register(); // register2()
$registerClass->activate();
$registerClass->coppaForm();

I like that since now I only have to worry about if there is another class with the same name as Register. what if a mod has the function name ‘Register’, what then? I would have to worry about if they had a class named Register, but I wouldn’t use ‘Register’ as the class name, I would call it SmfRegister or SMF_Register or SimpleMachinesRegister.

Functions aren’t bad however, but I like them as I can use different class models for controlling and plugging in classes.

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