Forum Software

[Herman]

We want to add a Forum to our site. I've been doing some research and am looking at Invision Power Board and Ikonboard. Does anyone have suggestions?

Also, what's the best way to incorporate a forum into a Miva store?

Thanks,
Herman

[dotCOM_host]

There's a plethora of forum-type software and the two you mentioned are in the top 10 of the most popular choices. They both work well, and feature set is comparable to most other common choices, so it really depends on what your exact requirements are. Review both apps' list of features carefully and pick the one that suits your requirements - other than that, they are both good.

As far as integrating it into a MIVA store... well, there isn't really an "integration" part, it's a stand-alone app that runs from its own directory. It would be best to customize the look and feel though to match your store so that moving from the store to the forums and back again is as transparrent as possible. If you were on MM v5 with mySQL back-end, you could share the logins between the forums and your store, something that would be much more difficult to implement in v4 store which I think you are running (since you posted in a MM4 forum).

[Julie Wilber]

Hi Herman,

MIVA Small Business uses VBulletin, and I have been more than happy with it. While there are some things that I find it lacking in, specifically the search function not being as strong as it could be, overall it handles most of our needs.

Personally, I have used PHPBB. Yeah, it's shareware and the projects that I have used it for have never been profit driven, so it's a nice match. I think PHPBB is easier to manipulate with cracks and hacks, but that's also because I have used it so much that it's a matter of being comfortable. I know a lot of the developer community in PHPBB, and they seem to have a better grasp on the addons. Not giving me more than I need, etc.

With Ikonboard, I have never been an admin on one, but I have been both a mod and member. I don't particularly mind it, but it wasn't as comfortable for me as PHPBB or VBulletin.

As for Invasion, only been a user, so can't really offer an opinion one way or another.

Definitely spend time at their forums and get to know the community. It will give you a really good idea of which board might be best for your needs.

Thanks!

[Herman]

Remik and Julie.

Thank you for your help. BTW, Julie. I really appreciate your presence on the forum. You are the only face of Miva most of us see. I think you deserve a raise.

Herman

[Julie Wilber]

We've been very busy at our San Diego office, but we (the entire staff here) are trying to post more often. Part of the issue is that our community is so on top of things, they usually post a better response than any of us could and twice as fast =) Yeah MIVA Merchant Community!

However, thanks for the kind words.

[apanda]

I have had a vBulletin for several years and I love it. It is very stable, upgrades are easy, and you can get tons of mods at vbulletin.org to customize it. I used phpbb for a second forum and after a while I ended up buying another license for vBulletin. phpbb is a target of hackers and you need to keep up with the patches. After my server got hacked because of phpbb I made the switch. At that time, my version of phpbb was about 1 month old. This happened about a year ago, so I haven't kept up with things at phpbb since then. Perhaps the stability has improved and it isn't as "hackable" now.