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Free open-source forums showdown: phpBB vs SMF vs MyBB

A lot of web hosting users are confused when they are trying to create their first community on which forum script to pick for their community as changing options down the line isn’t something that is preferred or can be easily done.

We are going to compare all 3 most popular scripts on a few points such as their user friendliness, security and reliability, these are the most important points when picking your forum script, however just because one of the contenders win doesn’t make it the best script out there, the needs of each person is different however we’re only comparing them in the case of general audience.

phpBB

phpBB was first created by James Atkinson (theFinn) in June 2000 as a UBB-like forum solution for his wife. Once released to the public through SourceForge, it gained popularity very quickly, and by December of the same year v1.0.0 was released. Two additional major releases, 1.2 and 1.4, were made in February and April of 2001. During this time, the development team expanded to include Bart van Bragt (BartVB) and Paul S. Owen (psoTFX). Work on phpBB 2.0.x began in February of 2001. phpBB2 was built entirely from scratch, and took an entire year to complete.

Finally, in April of 2002, phpBB 2.0.0 was made available to the public. The 2.0.x line of phpBB has since risen to become the most successful opensource bulletin board software worldwide. Work on phpBB 2.2 was started almost immediately and continued over the following years. On January 14, 2005, it was announced that phpBB 2.2 would be no more. Due to the large scale changes made to the codebase and the lack of backwards compatibility with phpBB 2.0.x., it was decided that the next version of phpBB would have to be 3.0.0, as is required under the Linux Kernel numbering system. Thus, phpBB3 “Olympus” was born.

User friendliness: 4.5

phpBB can be installed using Fantastico on most web hosting providers automatically with a couple of clicks which is a big plus for user friendliness and also the new subSilver theme that is included with phpBB 3 certainly looks very impressive and a lot more professional compared to the previous one included in phpBB 2, the administrative side has got a facelift which makes it look a lot better with better usability, while administrative control panels have always had design flaws on how to distribute data well through pages, phpBB certainly came up with good ways to bypass that. Also, it has been made more as a plug and play forum starting phpBB 3 compared to the previous hours of configuration spent to configure and find a decent theme for it.

Security: 4

Security is a pretty strong point for phpBB considering that for the previous 7 years, phpBB 2 had 38 security advisories, around 5 per year might be a high number but at the number of users that use it, it is very low. However the phpBB 3 seems to be going very strong, since its launch date which was 13th of December 2007 till now, which is around 6-7 months, and it has only had 1 security advisory which makes it very secure compared to other forum scripts around.

Reliability: 5

phpBB runs the world’s biggest online forum at the moment which is the Gaia online forum, it has 1,334,740,294 posts and over 12,589,038 members, these numbers are very big, the second biggest phpBB forum which is a Brazilian games forum has over 102,704,207 posts and 167,802 – The difference is huge but millions of posts and all these popular forums running phpBB with no problem is certainly very impressive and gives phpBB top marks for its reliability

Overall score: 14/15

The final score for phpBB is very high and it’s not surprising considering according to a small Google check, it is currently hosting over 6,680,000 forums and a big reason why is because of it’s popularity and how it’s very secure and reliable.

SMF

SMF was created to replace the forum software YaBB SE, which at the time was gaining a bad reputation because of problems with its Perl-based equivalent and similarly named software YaBB. YaBB was known to cause resource allocation problems and was resource heavy on many systems, in its earlier versions. YaBB SE was written as a rough PHP port of YaBB, but tended to have many of the same resource and even security problems since it was a port of the insecure Perl version. Joseph Fung and Jeff Lewis of Lewis Media Inc., the owners of YaBB SE and the original owners of SMF, made the decision to convert to a new brand and name.

SMF started as a small project by one of the YaBB SE developers and its main intent was to add more advanced templating to YaBB SE. The project then slowly grew to address common feature requests, efficiency problems, and security concerns. A rehaul of YaBB SE had been in development for several years, but was superseded by this then competing project. Popular interest in the new YaBB SE fork sparked a complete rewrite of the code, with security and performance in mind. This eventually became today’s Simple Machines Forum. The first SMF release was SMF 1.0 Beta 1a, released on 30 September 2003 to Charter Members only.

On the 23rd of October 2006, Simple Machines LLC was registered in the state of Arizona, and the transfer of copyrights from Lewis Media to Simple Machines LLC was completed on the 24th of November 2006 during a three-day retreat in Tucson, AZ. This was done for the “[solidification of] the team’s commitment to continuously providing free software, without the perceived risks of corporate influence”

User friendliness: 3.5

From all 3 forums, SMF doesn’t get a lot of credit for its user friendliness; the user interface that it comes with is very old and looks very outdated, it has been the same for quite a few years now with no face lift at all. The administrator panel is a lot more crowded/harder to understand than other scripts, the initial score for user friendliness was 3 however one neat feature that is given for is the web install, to sum it up, instead of having to download, uncompress, upload, install, you download one PHP file that does all of that, it’s very suitable and helpful however the UI still needs a lot more work for it to be on par. A plus because it can be automatically installed using Fantastico with a couple of clicks.

Security: 5

SMF might not take the pie at user friendliness but it steals it at security, for the past 4 years, it has only had 7 security advisories which means around 2 per year which is a big difference compared to the other forums, the elements and the main code is very secure which makes it a very good forum on the backend, however because it is not often updated, not having a lot of security advisories isn’t a surprise for a stable untouched product.

Reliability: 4

SMF isn’t popular amongst big forums, the biggest forum at the moment that is hosted by SMF has 4,358,549 posts and 30, 795 – While it is not very popular however it is secure which is why it’s reliability marks are a bit high, also it has a good implementation with Joomla which makes it one of the more popular choices for Joomla users, it is also being used on the Joomla support forum.

Overall score: 12.5/15

The overall score for SMF is expected; it has a lot of work to be done on feature-wise however it is very impressive on its security part and could be very well a future reliable forum script. It would be very useful to have it for a public forum with minimal features but maximum security.

MyBB

MyBB’s roots lie in the discussion boards XMB and DevBB — Years ago, Chris Boulton, web34rk and b0ndman started developing XMB. After some time, web34rk and b0ndman left the team and Chris became lead developer of a team with two other developers. Over time, staff shifted again and several developers didn’t like the way things were heading. Together, they forked XMB and created DevBB. DevBB was the predecessor to MyBB, a temporary solution for people to use whilst MyBB was being developed. Development teams changed frequently, but MyBB is still here with Chris Boulton as lead developer since 2002.

User friendliness: 4.5

The user friendliness of MyBB is very good, considering that it is a new player in the free forums game however it has been evolving fast and taking over the forums market quickly because of its very simple down-to-earth setup and configuration, it facilitates management of your forum by making everything a lot simpler but at the same time still having the capacities of advanced management such as provided in other good scripts or even good paid forum scripts. A small minus is that it is not automatically installable on web hosts using Fantastico.

Security: 3.5

The security is a major issue with MyBB, it is generally secure however it needs a lot more work, considering that it had 34 security advisories in the past 4 years which means around 9 security advisories per year, that is very high however it is still a new script and it has a lot of work to go into it, the more work that is done on it, the more it should be stable in the future, I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial versions of other forums would have as much exploits as this, however MyBB has a history of quickly addressing security issues and letting their clients know.

Reliability: 4

MyBB is very reliable because of how quick it is updated and is slowly starting to be adapted by big forums, one of the big forums that is ran by MyBB has over 3 million posts and 30 thousand members, a forum dedicated to NCAA (college sports). Another couple of forums with 100K posts are coming up soon, also the upcoming versions of MyBB have support for clustered MySQL database setups which gives them a big advantage for hosting big forums.

Overall score: 12/15

MyBB is still a work in progress and the release of their new upcoming 1.4 version might change a lot and should change a lot however the current status is very good and this project seems to be heading to the right track and following the tracks of other popular scripts.

Conclusion

To conclude, our winner is phpBB which is by far the best for the current time, it has been working forever for the past years with no problems and the release of phpBB 3 separates it from the competition by far however MyBB is upcoming well with their 1.4 release and SMF are still focusing on the very secure forum script.

Joomla web hosting: Is it suitable for your website or not?

Joomla is a very popular content management system that is popular amongst websites and can usually be automatically installed using Fantastico (Joomla web hosting is available on our web hosting plans) however the question comes often that if this very popular software is what you exactly need.

While Joomla is very expandable and can have a lot of modules to accomplish anything, sometimes it would be considered an overkill, as per example, using Joomla for a blog is usually an overkill unless you have a very advanced blog, however a great alternative for Joomla if you want to create your blog would be WordPress (which can be installed using Fantastico too).

However, if you have a site with a couple of pages but require a forum and other type of scripts where creating a theme for each would take a long time, Joomla is a good option however if you only have a couple of pages without the the need of theming, the best option might just be to stick with plain HTML.

So there are no wrong choices in this case however there are better in cases, if you’re going to use Joomla’s full capacities then it’s suggested however if you’ll be only using part of it, then maybe you’re looking at the wrong script.

Web Hosting for Dummies: Transferring your domain name

Step 1: Preparing for your domain transfer
There are a few things that need to be done before initiating a domain transfer, first you will need to login to your current domain registrar and make sure that your domain is unlocked else the domain name transfer will fail, also, the domain name must be registered for more than 60 days. Once the domain name is unlocked, you should make sure that all of your WHOIS information is valid information because they will be needed for the verification when sending your transfer request. After checking all of the above, you may now request your authorization key or EPP transfer code, instructions on how to get this should be provided by your domain registrar.

Step 2: Initiating the domain transfer
Once you have your authorization key or EPP transfer code in hand, you may now go to your new domain name registrar or web hosting company and find the “Transfer a domain name” function, once there, you will be asked for the domain name and afterwards the authorization key or EPP transfer code, make sure you copy-paste both to avoid any writing mistakes. You will also have to pay the fees involved after giving your authorization key or EPP transfer code, all domain name transfers include one year so that means you will get an extra year by transferring your domain name, usually, the price for the domain name transfer is the same price as a registration.

Step 3: Verifying the domain transfer
You should now check the email account placed in the WHOIS information for the coming 24-48 hours, there will be two emails that will be coming, first, it will be your new registrar confirming that you the owner of the domain name would like to transfer that domain name, afterwards, you will receive an email from your old registrar confirming that you would indeed like to release the domain name from their registry. These are the two most crucial steps to do, if you do not agree to transfer the domain in a short time frame, the transfer will automatically be cancelled.

Step 4: Completing & checking the transfer
Once you have agreed to both emails, you should await an email from your new registrar confirming the acquisition of your domain name, make sure that it is indeed in your account at your new registrar and for an extra verification step, make a WHOIS check on the domain name using any of the WHOIS sites on the internet, you can search Google for “WHOIS” and you will find them in the first few results. Put your domain in the field to WHOIS and you should see the name of your new registrar. You have completed transferring your domain name from your old registrar to the new registrar.

How to convert/encode files to FLV using FFMPEG & PHP

Need help using specific FFMPEG-PHP functions or some programming help? Let our experienced technicians help you debug your problem for FREE. Sign up today and post at our online community: FFMPEG-PHP Help Forums

Good News: Customers of VEXXHOST Web Hosting can now automatically install PHPmotion and VidiScript instantly from cPanel, they do not need to do any ffmpeg configuration or ffmpeg installation, they simply enter a username and a password and the software will be ready and online in seconds.

So, as I’ve written in an earlier article on how to install FFMPEG on your server, while there are those who probably use a “YouTube Clone” script, there might be those who want to create their own using FFMPEG & PHP. FLV is the most widely used type of codec that runs on most Flash players.

So, let’s get started, there are actually a few steps into converting a file to FLV which are shown below

1. Send the script to FFMPEG-PHP and get it’s info
So, before doing any of this, you should make sure that your file has been uploaded to somewhere and you have the full path to it. (You can’t use what you have in “memory”, so you’ll have to look on how to upload a file, once you got that and have the path of the file, we’ll start our script to invoke FFMPEG-PHP and get the file’s resolution. What we mainly need is the width, height & FPS (frame per second) so that we can tell FFMPEG about. I’ll be using the clock.avi located in every windows system.

We’ll start out our code with getting our variables:

// Set our source file
$srcFile = "/path/to/clock.avi";
$destFile = "/path/to/clock.flv";
$ffmpegPath = "/path/to/ffmpeg";
$flvtool2Path = "/path/to/flvtool2";

// Save our needed variables
$srcWidth = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameWidth());
$srcHeight = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameHeight());
$srcFPS = $ffmpegObj->getFrameRate();

Also, the width/height has to be multiples of two so I have created a function that makes it a multiple of two:

function makeMultipleTwo ($value)
{
$sType = gettype($value/2);

if($sType == "integer")
{
return $value;
} else {
return ($value-1);
}
}

2. Send the script to FFMPEG for encoding
Here is where the fun starts, executing it and telling FFMPEG where to place it later. Let’s see on how our command will consist and what it will be made of. We’ll see what quality settings we will have to set.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv

That’s generally how to convert a video.avi to video.flv with the audio sampling at 22050 & audio bit rate at 32, with the size 320×240. While I suggest the values above for audio as they are the most compressed, but we’ll use the old audio settings for better quality.

$srcAB = intval($ffmpegObj->getAudioBitRate()/1000);
$srcAR = $ffmpegObj->getAudioSampleRate();

Now we have pretty much most of the values ready for our compression, however, we need to call flvtool2 to get our Meta information. Steps 4 and 5 in the diagram work simultaneously with this one.

What we do is make flvtool2 run at the same time as FFMPEG so we’ll pipe it into the command which means our general command is

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv | flvtool2 -U stdin video.flv

Now, we have a kind of complete command, let’s make our final code!

<?php
// Set our source file
$srcFile = "/path/to/clock.avi";
$destFile = "/path/to/clock.flv";
$ffmpegPath = "/path/to/ffmpeg";
$flvtool2Path = "/path/to/flvtool2";
// Create our FFMPEG-PHP class
$ffmpegObj = new ffmpeg_movie($srcFile);
// Save our needed variables
$srcWidth = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameWidth());
$srcHeight = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameHeight());
$srcFPS = $ffmpegObj->getFrameRate();
$srcAB = intval($ffmpegObj->getAudioBitRate()/1000);
$srcAR = $ffmpegObj->getAudioSampleRate();
// Call our convert using exec()
exec($ffmpegPath . " -i " . $srcFile . " -ar " . $srcAR . " -ab " . $srcAB . " -f flv -s " . $srcWidth . "x" . $srcHeight . " " . $destFile . " | " . $flvtool2Path . " -U stdin " . $destFile);
// Make multiples function
function makeMultipleTwo ($value)
{
$sType = gettype($value/2);
if($sType == "integer")
{
return $value;
} else {
return ($value-1);
}
}
?>

Price tag: Screw up of the year — 2$ for an NEC 19″ LCD!

While browsing over at Amazon.ca, I just saw this and popped to my eye.. a 2$ brand new 19″ LCD! Better yet, apply for the Amazon VISA credit card and they’ll credit you 30$ — A free 19″ LCD!