2. myBB
MyBB according to the projects about page which contains some interesting historical points much like phpBB myBB also released its 1.0.0 release on the 9th of December, although it was 5 years later coming in 2005. The project has been around for a long time and is at least according to its blog looking to evolve in the not too distant future.
Install
I have never actually installed myBB so this was all new to me, but not much to report really I encountered no issues and the installer kept me informed of what was happening on each screen, perhaps one point of note was it was far more clicks than I perhaps expected as well as a little lacking in the wow factor.. but in terms of what it is intended to do .. it did exactly that and no complaints.
Configuration
MyBB has one large configuration tab which seems to be where a bulk of what I'm assuming are mostly global options are set and because the tabs have an option counter we can count them up to a total of 298 configurable options for again assumed mostly global options.
Other aspects such as permissions are handled under user management and forums themselves are managed under a specific forum management section, granted it sounds like a LOT of options and it is, but it's all well laid out and easy to find what may need to be tweaked, changed or updated - it's just again a lot and seems to be a theme of the older platforms which pre-date things like composer and simple extension installers, not to say they done to have either of those just that they are core heavy - and some will absolutely appreciate the fact it got a lot built-in.
Extensions / Themes
According to the official extend myBB page the project currently hosts 1260 projects, which based on a quick poke around does seem to consist of plugins and themes and some of the themes looked quite nice... little jealous
The project does look like it's running a bit slow and struggling with the emergence of new technologies (social media) so commercial offerings don't look to be plentiful, take this with a grain of salt I didn't deep dive into the project.
Summary
MyBB is a great choice for a community to get its teeth into and get started and it was one I did consider a while back, however it does look like it's slowed down on the development front but if you did like phpBBs approach then it's likely you'll want to put myBB on your radar too.
Pros
- Still in active development
- Large offering of plugins and themes
- Feature-rich (con: heavy)
- Very easy to install and manage.
Cons
- Shows its age a little, although can be made to look young again.
- Feature Heavy (pro: rich), lots and lots of configuration options don't like the portal included out the box (can be disabled afaik)
- default zip comes with documentation and upload folder... not a fan of that.
- ACP dashboard has a ton of wasted space.
Project Links
This post is part of our "best forums 2022" series, you can see the hub post here and you can also use that post for suggestions on other forums we should look into.
Otherwise, let us know what you think of our review of this forum in a response below, did we make a mistake? has it evolved in some massive way so needs a re-review?
