Date: 06/30/06 (PHP Community)    Keywords: php, templates, software

Note: This rant was prompted by phpBB's release of Beta1 of phpBB3... finally.

I think phpBB is stupid for not switching over to Smarty with version 3 of the forum. They've essentially reinvented the wheel and I don't think they did as good of a job as Smarty does. They can't complain about supporting "existing templates" because there are none. On top of that, they could really use some unit tests.

phpBB has gone down a long way since they first came out with phpBB 2. They used to be the leaders of forum software. Now they're playing catch up with everyone else. My own forums are so heavily modded that they already have more than half the features that phpBB3 will have. GameHavoc's forums, which recently were moved to vBulletin, already have all the features and then some that phpBB3 will have.

I would switch over to vBulletin except I can't afford it, nor do I want to pay more for each site I might use it on.

Are there no other very good PHP-based forum packages that don't cost money or have a code base that looks like it was originally made in PHP3 and never upgraded? I'm almost tempted to start making my own. There has got to be something out there that shows promise, though. Something with good coding practices and framework to back it up and make for easy development, deployment, and modification.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/php/465595.html