PunBB - forum
Top Features
- simple featureset
- XHTML compliant output
- styles
PunBB is, in some ways, the little brother of the mainstream open source forums. It is deliberately designed to be quick, have output which conforms to standards, and to not have too many whizzy, flashy widgets which detract from the actual business of using a forum.
Its a widely-used product, for all it claims to be aiming at a small market share that doesn’t want lots of extra featurs, that market share does seem to be quite big! When I started using PunBB for the first time, I suddenly realised where all those websites with informative forums which didn’t look at all similar were getting their software from. In all probability, you’ll have used it already without realising what was behind the page you were reading – which is a good thing for forum software. Since it is so widely used on the net, its interface is friendly and easy to get to grips with and its also very stable.
Try Our Demo
There’s a demo of PunBB all set up here at woollyblanket for you to try out. It gets reset every night so write as much as you like, in fact go mad and try out all the features. You need to register to post, but resetting the forum mean’s we’ll lose your login details – so if you want to post another day, you’ll have to log in again, and if we want to sell on your email address, we can’t because we deleted it!
Pop in and have a look: http://demo.woollyblanket.co.uk/punbb
If you have any problems with the forum, or any questions, then please get in touch. You can reach us on techsupport@woollyblanket.co.uk
More about PunBB
Features
The “small” featureset that the developers have aimed for is actually a great list of things required in good forum software. The things they have missed out are stuff like file uploads, polls, instant messaging, and so on. The upside of this is that if you want people to read and write messages to each other on a forum,they can do just that without too many distractions. You can see who’s on line and users can publish their email address and MSN/ICQ/AIM/whatever usernames as well in order to contact each other.
Administrative Tools
I should also mention the admin features, something which is very important if you are going to run a forum of your own as initially you’ll have to get everyone set up – and then one day you’ll have to upgrade, de-spam, or reorganise it in some way (possibly with little warning). There are a long list of things that can be turned on and off, such as signatures, avatars, censoring of certain words, use of smileys, and so on. You can add some rules that the user has to agree to when they sign up (you can see this on our demo site), and also require the email addresses to be confirmed. There’s a function for making the board unavailable to users, for example if you are doing some maintenance, which stops people from logging in and presents them with a polite message of your choice. There’s more in the admin section than most people could need, but its all there and ready if required.
Display Styles
PunBB comes with a series of styles ready-made with it, a few different colour combinations and the effects are very different from each other. In addition there are a number of other websites where it is possible to download styles to apply to a forum. The default is kind of blue and we’ve picked ‘Sulfur’, one of the other styles that is bundled with the download.
Other resources.
The most natural place to find out more about PunBB is on its own homepage, www.punbb.org. Here you can download the product, find out about the latest releases and also access the support forums. There are some styles and plugins available to download from the forums.