Forum Software Question

[Buck-Beaver]

I was wondering what software the MuppetCentral Forum is run on and/or who provides the service. I've seen this style interface on other websites and it seems to work nicely. We need to add a forum to a website that's being developed for my step-son's school and I was hoping to go with something similar.

Any help / direction would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Phillip]

The forum software we use is vBulletin and made by Jelsoft Enterprises. While there are many products that look similar (some are free others are not), vBulletin is the most powerful in my opinion due to it's customization features, extensive options, powerful MySQL database, and fast PHP structure. The support staff is also top notch. A very promising new version of vBulletin will be released next year which will take the software to the next level.

What's most important for your server is that it can handle a fairly large MySQL database (several hundred megs as your site grows) and that you have PHP installed. If you have GZip enabled it will be a huge plus as well as it will help to reduce the high bandwidth that a forum can use on your site.

The software license is $160 lifetime and then $30 a year for updates or $85 for a yearly leased license. For info and questions about vBulletin check out their Web site. They have a very active forum there as well which has a wealth of helpful info.

http://www.vbulletin.com

 

[Luke]

Also very close in power to Vbulletin and free is Invisionboard at http://www.invisionboard.com - the layout is very nice and it has many fans although not quite the features of Vbulletin.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Thanks for the info on vbulletin Philip! I think it's definately the way we want to go....though I wasn't aware of Invisionboard until Luke posted. It looks fairly good too but we will probably stick to vbulletin because of all the extra little bells and whistles.

Now, to finishing teaching myself PHP....

 

[Phillip]

Sounds good. If you need any help, let us know.