Most customizable forum?

dreamache

dreamache

New member
Jun 26, 2006
4,393
130
0
So I'm working on developing a site based around upcoming games - The entire games list is over 2k+ games in every genre and platform imaginable. I want each game to have its own forum.. ie; mydomain.com/genre/game-title/forum or forums.mydomain.com/genre/game-title

The issue is do I spend a fuckton of time writing something custom, or work with an existing forum software? I'd much rather use something that exists already, but I know one system I'd never use is vBulletin; customizing templates let alone messing with their code is a major pain in the ass.

Even though every game forum will be hosted on a single domain, I want each game forum separate from each other (even with customizable graphics), but I'll only be working off of one forum installation..

Not too familiar with what's out there aside from phpBB and vB.. I'd like something simple as possible, so it doesn't even necessarily have to be some fully featured forum system..

Ideas?
 


I don't know if you have coding skills, if so you could use a CMS like Expression Engine which is powerful and easy to customize. I don't know if vB can be customized as much as you want but according to my experience IPB and vBulletin are the better forum plattforms out there.
 
Honestly I don't find customizing vBulletin to be that hard, to each his own I guess. It's probably your best bet.
 
emergent said:
Honestly I don't find customizing vBulletin to be that hard, to each his own I guess. It's probably your best bet.
Click to expand...

I prefer to be able to work with actual files like (phpBB) or how wordpress does it. vBulletin you have to use their annoyingly pain in the ass template system from within the admin CP, and the code is spread across what seems to be thousands of little snippets you have to individually find and navigate.
 
dreamache said:
I prefer to be able to work with actual files like (phpBB) or how wordpress does it. vBulletin you have to use their annoyingly pain in the ass template system from within the admin CP, and the code is spread across what seems to be thousands of little snippets you have to individually find and navigate.
Click to expand...

There is a function whitelist in vB which with a small tweak will let you use include(). At that point you can make your base template (postbit and what not) and then change out your css/header/footer with includes and just edit files as you please.
 
dreamache said:
So I'm working on developing a site based around upcoming games - The entire games list is over 2k+ games in every genre and platform imaginable. I want each game to have its own forum.. ie; mydomain.com/genre/game-title/forum or forums.mydomain.com/genre/game-title

The issue is do I spend a fuckton of time writing something custom, or work with an existing forum software? I'd much rather use something that exists already, but I know one system I'd never use is vBulletin; customizing templates let alone messing with their code is a major pain in the ass.

Even though every game forum will be hosted on a single domain, I want each game forum separate from each other (even with customizable graphics), but I'll only be working off of one forum installation..

Not too familiar with what's out there aside from phpBB and vB.. I'd like something simple as possible, so it doesn't even necessarily have to be some fully featured forum system..

Ideas?
Click to expand...

I know if you use buddypress, bbpress and Wordpress each group gets it's own forum. You could make each game be it's own group but just change the wording.

Never saw a use for it until now.
 
I would recommend giving Drupal a look as it comes with a thin built-in forum ability that can be quite customized. What you are looking for Drupal doesn't do out of the box, but it would be fairly straight-forward to write a module that does exactly what you are looking for. I am actually adding this same type of forum to one of my sites in the near future. So yeah, I would give Drupal a look. It's a good compromise between having to write it from scratch VS having to work with some bloated system like VB.
 
lol. since this thread got bumped, ultimately I decided to code my own custom forums. worked out pretty well, was a lot of work but ultimately it allowed me to code for a lot of custom features that i wanted across the 1,000's of games my site has.. each game has its own forum and universal threads for each..

Forums and Community that's an example of a forum which is for a lounge

an example of a game specific forum:
Battlefield 3 Forums and Community

Certainly beats manually creating forums for every game (like you would have to with existing solutions, or hacking the fuck out of them).

Probably also a good reason why the site has 460k+ indexed pages. Now I just need to build links and get more traffic ;P Gets a measly 1k a day, #1 for upcoming games though which accounts for 220+.

edit: fuck, just realized the facebook login doesn't work anymore, thanks facebook. fuckfaces.
 
can you have a thread or a subforum to show in multiple places(forums) at once?

in what did you code it? how much time did it take? did you outsorce? was it just a grind or it was challenging?

thanks for answering ;p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom