Topic: Questions

I've been looking for a forum software and stumbled upon this. The pros seem to be simplicity and minimalizm. The cons are simplicity and minimalizm.

1. punbb doesn't seem to reset the "read" status of a thread when it has been viewed (the blue square stays blue). Is there a way to fix this?

2. what is the planned feature set of 1.3 as opposed to 1.2? what are the differences at present (besides visual appearance)?

3. I'm looking for a forum board which has the following features built-in: private messaging, downloads, a facility to implement bug reporting (a la bugzilla). Note: *not* mods/extensions, I need built-in features!

phpbb - no go: it's a bloody mess - the devs should learn to code first
smf - too complex, I need something far more simpler and lightweight
vb - ditto, not worth the price
punbb - lacks too many features; ugly (but that can be easily remedied)

If anyone knows of a forum soft which has the above; free - good, commercial - no matter, please do tell. At present rather I'm desperate to find a working solution and am looking into taking the present 1.3-dev and forking it.

Thanks!

Re: Questions

kakado wrote:

I've been looking for a forum software and stumbled upon this. The pros seem to be simplicity and minimalizm. The cons are simplicity and minimalizm.

Indeed. Oh, and one major pro that almost no other forums have : strict HTML (xhtml in this case), valid and semantic. No HTML soup ugliness.

1. punbb doesn't seem to reset the "read" status of a thread when it has been viewed (the blue square stays blue). Is there a way to fix this?

There's a mod doing it. And 1.3 version should have this in core.

2. what is the planned feature set of 1.3 as opposed to 1.2? what are the differences at present (besides visual appearance)?

Planned as far as I remember : native utf8 support, readable URL (rewritten), topics read marked as read, real advanced plugin system...

3. I'm looking for a forum board which has the following features built-in: private messaging, downloads, a facility to implement bug reporting (a la bugzilla). Note: *not* mods/extensions, I need built-in features!

First, these are not forums feature, at all. And I don't know any who has it all.

Re: Questions

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PunBB
There will likely be more features that aren't on that list (ie: UTF-8 support)

3. Those sound like they would all be extensions in 1.3
And why would extensions be unacceptable?

4

Re: Questions

kakado wrote:

At present rather I'm desperate to find a working solution and am looking into taking the present 1.3-dev and forking it.

At present, 1.3-dev is not finished or in a state that would be worth forking.

Wait till 1.3 is released, determine if you can accomplish what you desire between what's in the core and what's released as official extensions. I'll bet you that you'll be pleasantly surprised.

As for PunBB being ugly, I find it elegantly spartan wink

Re: Questions

PunBB default theme don't need really much to be truly beautiful. And even without it, they are quite nice. Especially compared to the others forums default themes, included the bloated one.