Silicon Chisel

A good bulletin board or forum is pretty much the cornerstone of an online community. Selecting and deploying one is a game of trade-offs. Do you go for something with all the great features, or something smaller and quicker? Do you go for something established that may be difficult to administer but has reams of plug-ins and skins, or something newer which may not have the add-ons, but will not consume a hours of time installing enhancements.

Simple Machines Forum more or less breaks the rules. It’s new, still on release 1.05, and not all that well known as compared with the flagship BBS’s packages like phpBB, vBulletin, and ikonBoard. But they got a lot of things right the first time. Enough to warrant serious attention by anyone looking to install a forum.

For starters, SMF is fast. It runs on PHP and mySQL While a relatively new player there are enough well-designed skins for the system to make adoption and integration into a site pretty straightforward. Likewise for plug-ins, I was surprised by just how quickly this product has had a wealth of add-ons developed for it. This is likely due in part to how well thought out the system is to begin with. It’s easier to write add-ons when the core code is well structured and the places to hook in functionality are obvious. There’s even a bridge to the Mambo CMS available.

The best part of SMF for the webmaster is the ease with which add-ons and themes are installed. Everything is handled through a nice upload interface. No logging into your web host and unzipping and moving things around by hand. No hacking of individual files like some BBS’s require you to do. Just browse to the .ZIP file, upload, and enable. The system is even smart enough to recognize when you need a special FTP access to do that upload (like on some shared hosts) and provides a way to temporarily input the over-ride user/password to enable the package to be uploaded.

And there are converters; at the time of this article there were converters from 4 major BBS systems into SMF available, as well as 3 more converters for variants of those systems.

All in all this is one of the best thought out forum systems available. If you are considering installing a new forum, SMF is definately worth a serious look.