smf vs phpbb3

Started by adicrst, December 13, 2007, 07:22:45 PM

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Chose your option

Only smf
47 (28.5%)
Only phpbb
4 (2.4%)
smf is better
68 (41.2%)
phpbb3 is better
25 (15.2%)
smf much catch up with phpbb3
21 (12.7%)

Total Members Voted: 158

gemigene

QuoteThe answer is quite simply. Smaller and new forums have to get out there, and that is one of the best ways

It isn't as if there were no competition out there, take a peek here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software_%28PHP%29

I really love SMF for a full-featured forum but when I need to put together something fast and reliable but with a limited number of functions (no PM, uploadable avatars, etc.), I go for UseBB.

Gene
"Religion is metaphysical statism. I will be ruled by no man on earth, nor by any god in heaven"

Bigguy

I never seen that chart before, really cool. :)

gemigene

Quote from: Bigguy on February 09, 2008, 03:57:18 PM
I never seen that chart before, really cool. :)

When I got frustrated over phpBB3, I think I must have tried 10 packages out of that list, what a riot that was...

Cheers,
Gene
"Religion is metaphysical statism. I will be ruled by no man on earth, nor by any god in heaven"

arod

#143
with your permission, i would like to return to the discussion of license.
if you are not interested, please skip my posts... :(
Quote from: Grudge on January 01, 2008, 01:10:43 PM
The original definition of open source (As per the literal meaning) was that the source code for software was available to users "In the clear" so to speak.
i do not believe this statement is correct.
when the ibm pc first came to the market (back in 1981. few of us gray folks still remember...), the code for the BIOS was "in the clear": the complete source code for the BIOS (in 8086 assembly language, beautifully commented) was published as part of the technical manuals, which were available for purchase from ibm publication.
(btw: this created a problem for the people who wanted to create clones - how to reproduce a functional version of the bios, aka "reverse engineer" it,  without opening themselves to litigation for copyright infringement).
no one would seriously argue that the original ibm pc bios was "open software" or "open source".
and on that note, being written in php, both vbulleting and ipb have their code "in the clear", so to speak. this does not make them open source, and neither smf meet the widely accepted definition for open source.
the usual definition of "open source" contains some pieces that are definitely not part of smf license:
-- the ability to use/adapt any part of the code,
-- the ability to freely re-distribute the original code as well as any modified version (sometime called "derivative work") of it
-- and yes, the ability to "fork out". forking out of a project can sometime have negative consequences, but, imo, the right way for a project to protect itself from undesirable forks is not by way of a restrictive license, but rather by insuring that it remains the best fork of all.

the above clauses (so long as one keeps the copyright notice, and sometimes the license notice as well) are pretty much an inseparable part of any true "open source" license. without them it may be free as in "free beer", but not free as in "free speech", as rms is fond of saying.
if the smf project would find a way to change their license to an open source one (does not have to be gpl), i would seriously consider it. as it is, i remain with open source.

daenney

Well I tried out SMF and phpbb3 side by side for two days now and phpbb3 drove me insane.

Though I like the new themes a lot, both the default board and Admin CP, the Admin CP itself is a total disaster.
I couldn't find the most standard of things among forum settings, I got so frustrated I actually went for a mountainbike ride for an hour to get rid of it.
The other mind blowingly frustrating thing is that there is still no freaking automated way to install a Mod. You have to download it, unzip and then view or an xml, txt, php file or whatever in your browser with the install instructions of where to upload and how to activate a mod... why, in the name of god's a** does it have to be so difficult?
Though the day to day tasks of managing users and groups are easy done once you get the hang of it just configuring forum options, setting forum rights depending on membergroups or even the most mundane of tasks seem to be excruciatingly difficult to achieve.

So, yeah, I'm back on SMF (never left, just decided to try out an alternative) and I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.
Another advantage of SMF I found, it integrates much more easy with other software. Getting DokuWiki to authenticate against SMF was a breeze whereas to do that with phpbb3 I had to go edit DokuWiki core files and break some other functionality such as ACL's.

* daenney gives SMF a big hug

hope the JFusion plugin enabled user syncing soon, then I'll really be a happy bunny


gemigene

#145
QuoteWell I tried out SMF and phpbb3 side by side for two days now and phpbb3 drove me insane.

If you ask politely, they'll send you Valium to get through their maze of inane ACP settings.

Quoteeven the most mundane of tasks seem to be excruciatingly difficult to achieve.

Well, look at it this way, it'll be their downfall. Most "Newbie" webmasters will move on to something simpler and logical to work with.

Another SMF fan,
Gene

p.s. just for the heck of it, I searched for permissions on their board (in ver. 3 section only) and got:
"Search found 7505 matches: permissions"
I guess I wasn't the only one with problems trying to set them up.
"Religion is metaphysical statism. I will be ruled by no man on earth, nor by any god in heaven"


wookey

Quote from: uberjon on December 14, 2007, 12:55:22 PM

i have to agree on the "dead easy to use" part. but i wonder if i should also be offended. (i tried many times to install phpbb2 back in the day. with no luck....


'aptitude install phpbb2' did the trick for me (on Debian). Utterly trivial. Sadly I can't do that for SMF (due to the licence). This is currently an overwhelming advantage for phpbb2 in my book. I guess you were installing from a tarball, or on a Windows box or something, whichI'm sure does make life a lot harder.

青山 素子

Quote from: wookey on March 05, 2008, 06:16:31 AM
'aptitude install phpbb2' did the trick for me (on Debian). Utterly trivial. Sadly I can't do that for SMF (due to the licence). This is currently an overwhelming advantage for phpbb2 in my book. I guess you were installing from a tarball, or on a Windows box or something, whichI'm sure does make life a lot harder.

Troll much? At least have an understanding of what SMF is before shooting off your mouth.

SMF is web software. It isn't a binary, nor is it any kind of compiled software. There is absolutely no reason to use apt to install it.

I suppose for those who just use defaults without thinking (asking to be hacked), it might be dead easy, but if you have changed your web root, you might run into some problems. I dunno, I never got the point of packaging web applications in this manner because it seemed pointless.

SMF, being PHP software, will work on Windows if you so desire. It is primarily tested on Linux / UNIX, however. It's really simple to install, too. You extract the archive to a directory and then load the install.php file in a browser (called through your web server, not locally).

It's that easy. No having to muck with apt, no having to worry that the repo maintainer will update the software quickly because of a huge security bug was announced and you are on the stable branch. If not, you'd have to update manually anyway, and that just broke your reason for using apt to install a web application.

Even if you do use phpBB, please do yourself a favor and not use apt.
Motoko-chan
Director, Simple Machines

Note: Unless otherwise stated, my posts are not representative of any official position or opinion of Simple Machines.


wookey

No, I don't troll much.

I was really just replying to the previous guy who said phpBB2 was really hard to install. I found it trivial to install because of apt and Debian packaging practices. That's not trolling. OK, the licence comment was a bit barbed, but also true :-) Yes, I agree that the packaging system does not always fit as well with Web software as with more conventional binaries which fit in the usual paths. It generally works very well until you have virtual servers, when things can get a bit fiddly, although some web-interfaced packages still work just fine like this (e.g. mailman, cvsweb), others less so (lurker).
 
And yes, it often less-than ideal if you need the latest-and-greatest. But having said that, I'm afraid I disagree with your conclusion that you shouldn't use apt for installing web/forum software. I run a lot of Debian servers, most of them stable and I try very hard indeed not to have any non-packaged software on them, web or otherwise, because the overall advantages of package management and automatic security updates far outweigh the fact the the software might not be paerticularly up to date. The danger of ending up with old unmaintained copies of web software lying about the machine providing security holes if you attempt to manage them manually, is significant - I've been bitten by old copies of PHP web software installed on a box, and not getting security updates, before.

Clearly if being bang up to date is more important to you then your approach will suit better, but you need to be damn careful to monitor what you've got installed where.  For me forum software is just one of a couple of thousand packages on each of about 20 boxes, for you it is probably really important stuff, so you can manage it manually.

It is true that I am relying on the package maintaners and security team to make security updates in a timely fashion, but I know for a fact that they will do a better job than I would. Equally, I rely on them to set the defaults to something adeqately secure, because I cannot be an expert in everything. Are there security issues you are aware of with the Debian packaging of phpBB2?

青山 素子

Quote from: wookey on March 05, 2008, 03:18:56 PM
Are there security issues you are aware of with the Debian packaging of phpBB2?

I haven't looked, but I'm not really a Debian user (I normally use Slackware). My concern is more general given that distribution's tendency to keep old software versions around long after they should be retired. (I was helping someone with AMaViSd-new who was running Debian Unstable. It turned out that unstable had a three year old version of the package in it with some big usability bugs that had long been fixed upstream. That basically kept me from bothering with it for my own stuff.)
Motoko-chan
Director, Simple Machines

Note: Unless otherwise stated, my posts are not representative of any official position or opinion of Simple Machines.


SneakyWho_am_i

I'm using Ubuntu at the moment. I had been a fan of Mandrake and Red Hat, etc, etc.... Anyway yeah apt-get... You can install a bunch of web scripts with it. Some of them even work! I wouldn't recommend it. The ones I've tried (trac, mantis, bugzilla... Mostly stuff like that) was all new enough,  just that sometimes it clean doesn't work. They really do hack stuff to bits before they stick it in the repository.
Mantis is a good example. apt-get install mantis ... On my system, apt couldn't set up the database for it. I tried about a hundred times, lol.
Yeah, most web stuff I try to install from the repositories just doesn't work. Granted it's probably the way I've set things up, and I'm talkign abotu trying it on a test system first (whci h has backports/proposed/etc enabled)....

Much, much easier to just download the package, dump it in your webroot somewhere, and set it up yourself.

How this ties back to this thread at all?
QuoteSadly I can't do that for SMF (due to the licence). This is currently an overwhelming advantage for phpbb2 in my book
I love being able to install things with apt, but as far as I'm concerned, web scripts are not one of those things so in my book, the two coem out even.

Further back into the topic, I set up phpbb2 (2, I think) using Fantastico. It was easy of course (you know fantastico) but....
To be honest I don't even remember it having an admin panel. it was nice, but smf was nicer. I didn't know php then so I didn't try looking at the code, php jsut felt more solid to me than what phpbb did. In my first week as a webmaster, no idea what I was doing, SMF looked like the way to go.

Back off topic slightly, I bridged SMF to Joomla!, and then to Mambo.
Now I mostly jsut run it by itself. It's easier to just install the bits you want as packages in SMF - SMF is a CMS in and of itself ;)


...

So although I don't know what phpbb has goign for it, SMF rocks my socks - thanks partly to the awesome package manager.

What I really want, though, is a way to install diffs as packages >:) (yeah, I know that SMF's package manager is more advanced than that, but hey)

QuoteTime is irrelevant to memory. How important that moment was to a person... I think that's all that matters
@quote: scientists have determined that something's memorable-ness is determined by its emotional significance. Not citing any sources.

metallica48423

Justin O'Leary
Ex-Project Manager
Ex-Lead Support Specialist

QuoteMicrosoft wants us to "Imagine life without walls"...
I say, "If there are no walls, who needs Windows?"


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Orstio

Quote@quote: scientists have determined that something's memorable-ness is determined by its emotional significance. Not citing any sources.

Ooo, can I? 

Science Magazine, November 2002:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5596/1191

SantaClaws

Woo, 17 people posted phpBB3 is much better. I have a question for them.

If you voted that phpBB3 is better, Then why are you here?

aldo

Quote from: pk3r 0wn on May 29, 2008, 12:56:34 PM
Woo, 17 people posted phpBB3 is much better. I have a question for them.

If you voted that phpBB3 is better, Then why are you here?
Who knows, I don't like phpBB however I am registered there, I have posted a couple times, I don't like going there because their site is SO confusing.

Plus, just because people think phpBB3 is better doesn't mean they can't use SMF ;)

However, yes I do like SMF more :P

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