PunBB 1.2.14 review
DownloadPunBB is a fast and lightweight discussion board. Its primary goal is to be a faster, smaller, and less graphic alternative to oth
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PunBB is a fast and lightweight discussion board.
Its primary goal is to be a faster, smaller, and less graphic alternative to otherwise excellent discussion boards like phpBB, Invision Power Board, and vBulletin.
PunBB project has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller pages.
The idea of PunBB was first born when I needed a discussion board for a website I was working on. After an exhaustive search, all the boards I found were either over-featured or too graphic for my needs. I wanted a package that
was fast.
had a simple layout and design.
was easy to administrate and moderate.
didn't output huge, non-valid, (X)HTML pages.
had source code you could read and understand.
To my dismay, such a forum was nowhere to be found. Thus, I started working on PunBB, or just Pun as it was called back then.
Developing software to "please the masses" isn't difficult. Just cram in every possible feature you can think of and most people will love it. Some people, however, will hate it and look for alternatives. The problem with developing for that other group of people is having to make decisions on whether to implement a feature or not. What is a "must-have" and what is not?
Some features that I have so far chosen not to implement are: private messaging, file attachments, polls, linking to off-site avatars, advanced text formatting controls, subforums etc etc. The jury is still out on some of these features, but don't expect them to pop up anytime soon. It should however be noted that most, if not all of these features have been realised in the form of third-party mods.
Requirements:
PunBB is written in PHP and thus requires the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PunBB also requires a database in which all forum data is stored. For that purpose PunBB supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.
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