Forum software to fit in current design?

[fctoma]

I have a client wanting to put a forum within their existing site. Most of the forum programs/software I've seen out there do this but for the most part they look like they can't be "included" within the site's current framework/template. They look completely different with little modification to the look.

Can anyone recommend a good software package/service that will allow me to put the code for the forum within our site's template so it doesn't look like they're leaving our site?

ANY info mucho appreciated.

[speed]

Depends on your site design and how much time you're willing to put in to modifying the forum skin but vBulletin is pretty flexible.

As an example of skinned vBulletin, I've just been helping a good friend of mine with a music news and review site, I was creating a few PHP scripts for her, On The Barrier is the main site and Music Social Network is the forum social portion of the site. It's only been there a couple of days which is why it's a little sparse.

In this case the forum is on a sub-domain but it doesn't have to be and could have been in a folder on the main domain, we had a reason for keeping it separate in this case. It is possible to have it match the main site more closely, but there are some extra menus the forum needs so you do need to adjust the design to get them all in.

Only thing with vBulletin is it's table based.

[fctoma]

Thank you Speed! I'll check vBulletin out for sure. Looks promising! Also, nice job on the music site, well done!

[speed]

Originally Posted by fctoma

I'll check vBulletin out for sure. Looks promising!

If you do go vBulletin then have a dig through http://www.vbulletin.org, there's various mods, skin changes and so on, providing you don't go mad with them you can get some quite interesting results. There's a selection installed on OTB mixed with some additional coding.

Also, nice job on the music site, well done!

Thanks, I'll pass that on to the designer.

[microtekblue]

Try and Look into DotNetNuke.com

[a53mp]

vbulletin can be pretty scary if you are not used to it.

I personally really like using smf forums (simplemachines.org I believe)

[BradHart]

If you have a wordpress based site simple press forums from stuff at yellowfish is awesome. I have it installed on most of my sites even if I have had trouble attracting members, simply because it gives me another avenue of built in SEO. Feeds and a place to create user profiles with well placed links are just two options. It also has a variety of options when it comes to pretty permalinks and tags something you are hard pressed to do well in other forum software.

They just released the final version of 4.0 and it works really well within any well made wordpress theme. Depending on your size requirements you might have to make a template file for your forum page to adjust your standard blog sidebar on the forum page, but that is very simple to do.

[Hometutor]

Originally Posted by a53mp

vbulletin can be pretty scary if you are not used to it.

I personally really like using smf forums (simplemachines.org I believe)

Love smf

Rick

[mrnuff]

I use simple machines and its great. I don't have near the spam problems I had with the previous forum packages I've used.

I think it fits well with my site design. It wasn't too hard to setup.

I just adjusted the header section and changed all the colors in the css file to match my color scheme.

regular site:
thetanneryinc. com

forum section:
thetanneryinc. com/forums

[anthonyh]

I dont think its a matter of "which forum" but rather its a matter of skill with coding and css.

There are many great forum softwares - SMF is one of my favs, but to get it to look like your current website will always require some manipulation of the forum's css. You could try to find a skin that closely matches, but there will always be compromise - better to get your hands dirty with CSS if the budget allows.

If you want to use your current website CSS in your forum, then you will need to include the CSS file in the head of your forum. Thats pretty simple to do usually, but you will still have styles that are unique to the forum that are not defined in your main CSS. So either way, you will need to do significant CSS edits.

There is one way to almost avoid this - use Joomla CSS with Fireboard. Fireboad is a 3rd party component that integrates with Joomla - its not a seperate package requiring a bridge of wrapper. It has an option where you can have it use the main joomla CSS styles. Although this sounds promising, I have found that you still need to tweak the css to get it looking perfect. Fireboard is full featured - so it has everything that the others have, with the current exception of user groups - you are stuck with the joomla acl.

Here is a recent example of Joomla with Fireboard and very minimal CSS edits -
buddhahouse dot org (forward slash) index dot php(forward slash) Discussion-Forum/ (- remove spaces etc)

(- err ... YIKES! you cannot post links in this forum untill you have posted 10 messages - thats fair enough, but if I had not copied my message to the clipboard, then I would have lost this post forever ... grrr ... though the Quick post option does preserve the text - good)

Anyway, I imagine that this (Joomla solution) is similar to the mentioned WordPress solution, but why go for a cute pen-knife when you have a titanium Swiss Army available? WordPress users are such fanatics! hehe

To sum up - dont worry about looking at different forum packages - use your time to become more skilled at CSS - then such questions will become redundant, the stars will align, and all will be well with the universe.

[speed]

On the spam issue, vBulletin supports reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books which stops all spam except for were a human signs up. To deal with human idiots I've found if you disable PMs, signatures and a few other bits until they have at least 1 post it's stops all but spam posts. Spam posts are pretty easy to see, then you just select them followed by delete and ban option.

[noah0295]

I agree that it really doesn't matter that much which forum software you use but how much time and effort you want to put into it. I use invision board and not for any particular reason other than it was free at the time I decided I wanted to add a forum to my site. I don't know anything about PHP or CSS but I have been able to figure out how to add advertising and links, etc. It also uses CAPTCHA as an anti-spam measure which believe me is a very important feature as your forum grows.

I know I will bet flamed for this but in order to make it go along with the rest of my site and not spend much time I framed it. My main site is Coaching Drills, Information and Products For Youth Sports and the forum is Y-coach Message Board.

[MtraX]

No one mentions PHPBB? I must say it's between SMF and PHPBB for me It's all about skinning it to be styled into your site. My best advice would be to find a skin that's close to what your site looks like and then just tweak the CSS. You can obviously insert your site header and footer and style it to fit better with your site, but it might become quite an excersize. Just make 100% sure you employ SPAM prevention tactics though as once your forum becomes popular it will most automatically become a target for spammers.

I have seen SPAMBOTs get right past image verification and even token based verification, a good one to use is the simple math question method (can't remember the plugin name), but it asks a stupid questions on registration eg What colour is the sky? or Is fire Hot? etc and users have to answer it to complete their registration. That seemed to work pretty well as bots don't have that logic.

[carol]

I tried PHPBB several years ago for a closed forum, and wanted to change the name of the key modules so the bots out there that search for those known files (like the admin files, etc) wouldn't be able to find them. But each time they updated the application, it was a nightmare to go back and find where I needed to make the modifications, and I finally just gave up and took down the forum. (It was a good thing that the clients never used it.)

Have you had any experience with this, and how did you solve it? That's my main concern with the free, open source applications - everyone knows the module names, which lessens their security.

[sushil]

try it........
DotNetNuke.com