SMF can trace its roots all the way back to a perl powered message board, YaBB. After awhile, there became a demand for a php coded version of YaBB. So that is where YaBBSE comes into play. While YaBBSE was getting bigger and bigger, there were certain aspects of it that just needed improvement and reworking. The decision was made that it was best to separate from YaBBSE because it was a lot different from YaBB and it was best to start from scratch. At this point, SMF started being developed. On September 29th, 2003, the first beta of SMF was released to charter members, SMF 1.0 Beta 1. While this was a huge milestone for SMF, only charter members had access to use it. But on March 10, 2004, SMF made its public debut with the first public SMF release available to everyone.

The people behind SMF are a diverse group of individuals who in their free time, put their efforts together to help make SMF what it is today, and help SMF take strides into the future. Many different uses of skills are expressed within several teams, including a customization team, development team, documentation team, support team, marketing team, project management team and a internationalization team. Each team works together to help SMF grow and reach its full potential. We are people, just like you, who put our efforts into SMF, driven by passion we have for the software. For a listing of all the team members who have helped put together the latest release of SMF, see the team page.

SMF strives to get better and better. Active discussions amongst the team are being made to discuss the future of SMF. In the future, you can expect SMF to be even more user-friendly, offer better and quicker support, and much more. This is just the beginning for SMF, expect the building blocks of SMF and the community to be expanded, but to keep to the original goal: Simple, elegant, powerful, and free.