Forum/CMS recommendation

[HWT]

Fingers in too many pies again.

I have a thing for green, alternative energy, sustainable living, complaining about overpriced houses, policy discussion re sustainability, growing yoru own food, living the simple life to save money etc and I'd like to roll all these onto one site. I just got a domain, and I'd like to put articles for discussion and a general forum up. I have a little of this on my main website but it never really fit in.

Drupal is a very poor choice (crap forum), Wordpress is primarily bloggy, IPB is virtually perfect but a bit pricey, and I'm looking at SMF at the moment.

Any other suggestions?

[Brendan]

Well as you can see we use VBulletin here, and its great.. but it is primarily a forum, there a few a few mods you can make to it to turn it into a CMS with blog facilities and it can be great.. but its not free, however you get the support.

PhpBB is a great option if you are something free, I use it on another of my sites and really like it as well, just lacks support.

I have also used Joomla as a CMS and that seemed pretty good as well

[HWT]

We use phpbb on another forum, it is truly awful - very limited options for anything, but its ok for a very very small forum like ours.

Does Joomla actually have a *good* forum plugin? Drupal has one but it has even less features than phpbb.

[Brendan]

Have you tried the latest version of phpbb? It is much better than the previous ones.

I dont think Joomla has an out of the box forum, but a few people have done vbulletin bridges.

I have seen some pretty good installs of smf.. Ive never tried it myself.

I would be interested to hear what you finally decide.

[HWT]

I put up SMF but it totally trashed the permissions in our home directory on the webserver, to the extent we can't upgrade it because half the file structure is owned by 'nobody'. This is making me think twice about actually going further with SMF.

[JamesGG]

Hiya,

I have no idea about the complicated IT-nerd details behind it all, but, my website at Yes2 uses joomla as the CMS. It's a beautiful thing to use, especially as someone who knows nothing about the interweb.

We do have a forum in there, but, I have no idea how it happened. That was my business partner's doing. Or possibly the guy that she hired to cut up the site. No idea.

Cheers

James.

[Slade]

Hiya,

I have no idea about the complicated IT-nerd details behind it all, but, my website at Yes2 uses joomla as the CMS. It's a beautiful thing to use, especially as someone who knows nothing about the interweb.

We do have a forum in there, but, I have no idea how it happened. That was my business partner's doing. Or possibly the guy that she hired to cut up the site. No idea.

Cheers

James.

Hey James, great site.. it looks like you guys are using phpbb3

[JamesGG]

Hey James, great site.. it looks like you guys are using phpbb3

Hiya,

Thanks, mate. The site is still a work in progress but may be part of something much bigger next year. Just gotta put some quality time into it...

I'll take your word on the phpbb3 thing. I just know that the forum is very quiet since I haven't bothered advertising it yet

Cheers

James.