Topic: Recommend a message board

[micah]

So a client wants a private message board integrated into their site.  Honestly, it doesn't need a ton of features just user management, pre-defined boards/categories, the ability to add topics/threads and for the users to contribute to the topics, obviously.  As far as admin, just basic gatekeeper roles.

The real challenge is the ability to fully customize and integrate it into the design.

I'd almost to prefer to just create our own system (its a big client with a huge budget) but I believe the general consensus is towards an off the shelf product.

Thoughts?  Again, the main issue is design integration.  Some wiz-bang user interface options might be nice too.

Mike, are you still involved in SMF stuff?  Anyone use anything else?

[ober]

vBulletin is the big standalone one, obviously.  The backend is nice and easy to modify but I don't like how they handle some stuff and it feels clunky to me.  SMF is a little more light weight.  It's fairly easy to customize and has some pretty decent plugins for a variety of stuff.  It also doesn't cost anything or have yearly license fees.  Beyond those, I've heard PHPBB is decent but I don't really know the other players.

I don't know what your client's site runs on but Mingle is a good plugin for Wordpress.  I don't know what the skinning options are but it's probably possible.   If you're running Joomla, Kunena is pretty decent and kinda easy to change up.

That's about all I know.

[Mike]

I'm loosely involved with SMF.  If you go with SMF for the theme you'll probably only need to edit a few templates and the CSS file.  Honestly, I'd go with an established product over a in-house build.  If you have a list of requirements I could tell you if SMF fits it or not.

[Govtcheez]

Just make him a sub board in Safe Contact.  Boom, that'll be $500

[ober]

I'm sure his client would really enjoy titles like 'jackass' and the like.

[Mike]

We could change it to "Greedy Corporate Moneybags"

[micah]

LOL  I like the idea.
won't fly in this case though, the site is actually for our client's client and we're ghost-developing it.  The board is for an intranet and could potentially have 300,000 to 400,000 users (although, that assumes that every employee used it; the reality is probably a slim fraction of that range)

[Mike]

LOL  I like the idea.
won't fly in this case though, the site is actually for our client's client and we're ghost-developing it.  The board is for an intranet and could potentially have 300,000 to 400,000 users (although, that assumes that every employee used it; the reality is probably a slim fraction of that range)

While the number of total users isn't *much* of an issue you should try to figure out what the concurrent usage will be.  With that many I would also be looking at integrating with their current authentication system (e.g. LDAP).  I believe SMF has some mods already for LDAP but if not there are hooks to help with that.  Nice thing with that is you could set it up so that a forum account isn't created until they actually go to the forum.

[ober]

LDAP fucking rocks.

[Mike]

I'm on the fence about LDAP.  For a large organization (like Micah's example) I totally see it.  But at my work it just seems more trouble than it is worth.  Maybe I just haven't gotten into it enough.

[ober]

My company only has like 60 employees and it's the best thing since sliced bread. 

[Mike]

I feel like we should split this off but oh well.

How do you guys use it?  Like what do you store in it?  One thing I'd love is if we could store some basic permissions in it and be able to query whether or not a user is allowed to do something.  We'd mostly be using it to integrate authentication and basic permissions between various software (our SIS, Moodle, Drupal, our Bug Tracker, etc).

[ober]

It's purely for authentication here (most applications don't support more than that).  We use it to manage logins for bugzilla, our time keeping software, our learning center (wordpress) and a few other systems.  You have the user login and then you can go in as an admin and increase their privelages in that system.  They start out with whatever basic role is available. 

[charlie]

I don't like vBulletin because it marks all threads as read if you visit the site and then leave for a period of time, even if you didn't actually read all the threads. I hate that. I would never suggest vBulletin for anything.

As a user, SMF is my favorite of the ones I've seen. Don't forget about the users!

[Steve]

SMF