Phpbb or flarum?

burningflame

Spent my whole day on it ? You guys really made it so awesome. I fell in love with it. Good luck.
And thx for suggestion I can wait for a few weeks I think.

luceos

burningflame And thx for suggestion I can wait for a few weeks I think.

Waiting a couple of weeks related to doing the upgrade to the new version when it comes out. You can safely install beta 7.1 now (stick to well established extensions) and upgrade to beta 8.

burningflame

Thx

burningflame

Meow

I have been focused on both of phpBB and Flarum (previously esoTalk and FluxBB) for many years. I could only say that it just depends on what you need, as their core functions, usages and goals are very different from each other. Besides, both of them have an active development team.

Jenxi

burningflame My two cents on this. Flarum looks way better on mobile and that's a big plus if your traffic will be from mobile users. Also, it's looks more modern and feels lighter than phpBB.

Kryonoglou

phpbb or flarum?
Flarum for sure ?

burningflame

Thx for your valuable suggestions guys. ?

meetdilip

Have you decided @burningflame ?

burningflame

@meetdilip yeah man I switched to flarum you can check it. But I am trying to have some modifications with it. Soon gonna make it better after my exams.??

UziForex

Above all Howdy Everyone. I'm a newbie and I didn't see a specific section to present myself to the community.

So I start here. I am a stranger, so excuse my English.

I have a job and I founded a little community around my job exactly in phpbb.

In the last months I saw FLARUM with a great interest, because in phpbb I spent half of my time to manage ... the phpbb ! And this instead of following my community.

Now I migrated all my phpbb to FLARUM and it's a DREAM !!!

In FLARUM all is so simple that It seems impossible, I can't think the giant work the FLARUM STAFF did and are doing to create and share a so fantastic product.

Back to the topic: my opinion after a couple of years using phpbb ?

phpbb ? A nightmare
FLARUM ? A dream

Thx. Marco.

luceos

UziForex thanks Marco, such praise is awesome. What migration tool did you use?

UziForex

Hi Luceos and thanks for your attention 😃
I've the great advantage that we talk about the present economic/markets situation.

Every day I close all the topics and we start with the new day. The past topics have any great importance.

I simple kept a couple of months with both the discussions board opened and the next week with the new month I'll close the phpbb and we keep on only in FALURIM.

So I didn't need a migration of old data but simply a transition period of 2 months.

Thx. Marco.

UziForex

An example of phpbb vs FLARUM ?

phpbb has stubbornly used the editor in bbcode without alternatives.

Then no one writes correctly in bbcode nor uses the editor.

If they make a list, my users do not use the correct syntax of the bbcode, but they prefer to write by hand 1 and the text, 2 and the text, 3 and the test ... and so on.

In practice they use markdown without knowing it !

Thx. Marco.

neptronix

phpbb is dead simple to hack on if you understand css, html, and some rudimentary php.
flarum is hard to hack on and wants you to do things phpbb has baked into the cake via extensions, which requires some serious skills and time to figure out how to write. Even just changing the theme extensively requires writing an extension, which means that a front end designer cannot work on extensive theming.. only simple things like changing colors and removing or modifying elements using CSS.

phpbb is kind of locked into an early 2000's style design and functionality though, leaving you with a very large hack job to move it up to modern standards. It means that you basically need to maintain a fork of the code, or use extensions which are often broken between versions as well.

Flarum's main asset is that it gives you a lot of the modern stuff up front, but customizing it is a lot more work because you gotta work within the extension way. Hacking the code directly and merging it into a new release would be a much huger nightmare than doing so with phpbb.

In theory, you work won't go to waste over time if you go with the extensions route in flarum. But we don't know yet, it's still in beta and the way extensions need to be written have changed over time.

All the nice functionality of the stock flarum install come with the downside of a much more advanced internal structure with many more internal layers and abstractions to sort through. The developers could not suggest a debugger for me to start doing more advanced things and discourages me from doing so, if that tells you anything.

If you have a simple forum that does not require extensive custom modification, flarum is probably the way to go.

I have not found the ideal forum software, so i've decided to write my own because i'm frustrated with everything that is out there.

neptronix

That being said, maybe the extensions ecosystem for flarum will be good enough to prevent forum owners from having to do the massive work of hacking it. It is too early to tell. Flarum dudes have made a lot of promises and set up a lot of infrastructure for the extensions.

AFAIK phpbb has no future. I looked at their early 4.x redesigns and AM NOT IMPRESSED AT ALL. In my opinion, this contains no new good ideas so far. phpbb team recently introduced a media embed plugin that's partially broken and they refuse to fix it or provide any guidance on how to fix it. It's bad news when they won't fully implement basic modern features.

The forum software world needs it's ass kicked into gear though and i think discourse and flarum are doing a good job of that, but they both come with hitches. Discourse is written in ruby and that language is falling out of popularity now. Easy as phpbb to hack on.... IF you take the time to learn a dying language!