Please upgrade here. These earlier versions are no longer being updated and have security issues.
HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.
Forum software advice needed
Hello All ... we want to migrate our sites current forum (proprietary built) to a newer, more modern (feature rich) platform. I've been looking around at the available options and have narrowed it down to vBulletin, Vanilla or Phorum (unless you have another suggestion ?). I hope someone here can give me some feedback on their experiences either migrating to a new forum or working deeply with one.
The current forum we have has approx 2.2 million threads in it and is contained in a MySQL database. Data Migration is obviously the first issue, is one of the major Forum vendors better or worse in this regard ?
The software needs to be able to be clustered and cached to ensure availability and performance.
We want it to be PHP based and store it's data in MySQL.
The code needs to be open to allow us to highly customise the software both to strip out a lot of stuff and be able to integrate our sites features. A lot of the forums I've looked at have a lot of duplicate features to our main site, in particular member management, profiles etc. I realise we'll have to do a good bit of development in removing these and tieing it all back to the main site so we want to find a platform that makes this kind of integration as easy as possible.
Finally I guess if 'future proofing' the forum (as best as possible) given the above. Which platform will allow us to customise it but also allow us to keep instep with upgrades. Which forum software has the best track record for bringing online new features in a timely manner ? etc. etc.
Obviously I'm hoping I can find out here why Vanilla is the best solution for our needs ?
- David
The current forum we have has approx 2.2 million threads in it and is contained in a MySQL database. Data Migration is obviously the first issue, is one of the major Forum vendors better or worse in this regard ?
The software needs to be able to be clustered and cached to ensure availability and performance.
We want it to be PHP based and store it's data in MySQL.
The code needs to be open to allow us to highly customise the software both to strip out a lot of stuff and be able to integrate our sites features. A lot of the forums I've looked at have a lot of duplicate features to our main site, in particular member management, profiles etc. I realise we'll have to do a good bit of development in removing these and tieing it all back to the main site so we want to find a platform that makes this kind of integration as easy as possible.
Finally I guess if 'future proofing' the forum (as best as possible) given the above. Which platform will allow us to customise it but also allow us to keep instep with upgrades. Which forum software has the best track record for bringing online new features in a timely manner ? etc. etc.
Obviously I'm hoping I can find out here why Vanilla is the best solution for our needs ?
- David
0
Comments
The short version: Vanilla is a spot-on match for most of your requirements, but I'm not sure where we stand with caching for self-hosted installations.
As a former vBulletin user / plugin developer, I'll simply say that yes, it scales well (perhaps even the best still, if not for much longer), but no, I'd never lock my future into that quagmire of code again.
That's quite a big forum you've got there. I'll try to answer your post point by point.
1) Data Migration
We have an importing system called VanillaPorter (written by @Todd and @Lincoln). It uses an intermediate format for transporting data, so we could make a custom 'driver' for your proprietary format.
2) Clustering and Caching
We're not there just yet. We have the technology to cache things now, but we haven't put much / any work into implementing it at the moment, though it is constantly creeping up the priority list.
3) Coder Friendly
Vanilla is (we think) quite well designed. We also have several plugins that could, out of the box, allow you to integrate with your mainsite userbase easily and effectively. Check out http://www.vanillaforums.org/addons/addon/proxyconnect-plugin
As far as modifying the Core, its pretty easy to do. On the other hand, if you make direct changes to core files you'll lose the ability to automatically update. Its far better to augment what is already in the core with additional applications and plugins. These have the ability to dramatically alter the way the software works and should, for the most part, be sufficient.
Get in contact with us via email if you want to take this further
Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]
Data Migration: Our migration is pretty easy and is a matter of writing sql statements to select from your tables and then providing the column name mappings to our tables. If you have a single-threaded forum then this will be a pretty straight translation. Otherwise, Vanilla might not be for you.
User Management: We've done a lot of work with single sign on and would recommend this approach to getting another app integrated with your site. We originally wanted to make the system set up to completely rip user-management out, but users are joined on tables so much that this is hard to do.
In the end, having a system where we still keep a user table, but the user is synched whenever they log in to Vanilla through your site is the best solution we can find. I don't think any other forum has done as much work in this area as us.
As I read more about the various offerings and testimonial around the forums it seems like what we need is really between Vanilla and Phorum, both of which seem to come from more of a open development philosophy and should make customisation on all levels easier.
How do you all feel Vanilla sets it self apart from Phorum ?
Again thank you all very much for your time.
- David
//edit: I lied, phorum-5.2.16-RC1 was Oct 15. Their news page hasn't been updated since 5.2.0 was released apparently. Frankly, I haven't been aware of that project so I can't comment on it on a feature-per-feature basis.
Anyway! I suggest a testing environment with Vanilla on your localhost and do some test-customisations before you make a decision.
- First, there are some bugs that make my forum users sometimes accuse me I migrated them to alpha software (like pagebrowser on popular view). User submitted bug list on my forum is quite long, and I have mine longer still.
- Second, some bugs are taking a long time to be solved and developers feedback is a bit "thin"
- Third, there are some things I'd like to control but cannot manage to find out how. I'm used to detailed documentation like you can find in Python/Django environment, but Vanilla is just not there yet.
- Fourth, user management and moderation tools are a bit lacking for now and that can be a problem on big forums.
- Fifth, some addons can break things badly
- And last, I think development team is a bit trigger happy when it comes to publishing new functionalities so often we end up with quite a few new bugs after upgrading, along with old ones.
Oh, but did I say, regardless of all that I really love Vanilla
Btw, what is code of conduct for addon issues? I am reporting them here on forum because I didn't find appropriate place on github. Is that ok?
Just to let you know that I appreciate the thoughtful comments.
However, I hope I will be able to help with some real debugging some time from now