Fireboard

I'm a novice forum admin, as I only run one. I have a community as part of www.moonlightfans.com, which is my fansite for the CBS TV series Moonlight.

I use the Joomla! CMS, and there's only one native forum component... Fireboard.

While production and development on the software was going really well for six months, it randomly came to a standstill, and developers abandoned the project, which is an unfortunate side effect of Open Source.

Fireboard has alot of great features, but is just not efficient at all at utilizing server resources. It's pretty much the single reason I had to switch from a shared to VPS server.

So, if you use Joomla! and are considering using Fireboard... DON'T! It's not worth it at all.

Rockettheme is developing a PHPBB3 Bridge, which looks very promising. Also, there's a SMF bridge out there which works remarkably.

 

First of all, Patrick, welcome aboard!

Indeed, Joomla! Fireboard is a nice piece of software, and is also quite customizable (in fact, an excellent example of a nicely customized Fireboard community is Moonlight Fans, if I must say so myself). It's going to be interesting to see how development on the phpBB3 bridge turns out, simply because there aren't many "bridged" forum alternatives available today for Joomla! users (which is quite sad). While I've never used the SMF bridge, I have heard from multiple people that it does indeed work fantastically, and is also very easy to manage.

Chris

 

Thanks Chris!

Feature wise, Fireboard is awesome. I've never used anything else, because Moonlight Fans is my first site/forum, but there are some really cool mod tools. Viewable by mods/admins, there's a third column on the page where all the threads are listed, which has checkboxes for moving threads. So, if I was expanding a specific forum into sub-forums, I could just check all the threads I wanted to move and do a mass move. Also, it has really nice integration with Joomla.

I'd love to use Fireboard on a future site, but development is moving really slow. It's very database intensive, which is the main issue.

I'm excited to see how the phpBB3 bridge turns out as well, I also heard that Rockettheme might open a phpBB3 theme club to compliment their Joomla! templates, which would be really cool.

 

I concur. Joomla! and Fireboard were great. It is a shame to see that the development of Joomla! came to a sudden stop.

A forum originally built on Fireboard, although highly server intensive, will definitely get the job done. But now, after looking at the developers of Joomla!, it's probably best to choose another forum software for creating a new forum, like you said.

 

I'm not a fan of phpbb at all. I'd go with SMF if you need to pick a bridge to integrate into Joomla - but this is from someone with limited experience with the software.

 

I think it's very cool that you are sticking with the software that you originally started out with. I've briefly played around with Fireboard, and was quite impressed with what I saw. I must admit, though, that I was a bit skeptical when I first saw it, and was expecting to see a simple user interface with just a sub-par feature set. Apparently, I was wrong! :p As I said before, it was quite impressive, particularly as it is essentially just an add-on module/bridge, developed solely for use with a CMS.

 

It's very cool that there's finally a native forum component for Joomla!, which is a really great CMS.

What I find really cool about it is how since it is Open Source, there's people contributing to add ons, even if development on the official side of things is slow. People are making cool things like YouTube tags, mambot integration for admins for Joomla, and also, spoiler tags, which allow "spoiler" information to be masked so viewers who wish to read the spoilers must hit "Show" to read the spoiler, which is especially useful for a TV site! I still have to reinstall these plugins since I upgraded.

 

I'm not a fan of phpBB either, however, it will be interesting to see how such a Joomla! bridge will turn out to be. As I mentioned before, there really aren't that many forum options available for CMS users (particularly for Joomla!), and developing/releasing a bridge for phpBB3 is at least providing these users with an additional alternative.

 

Best of Joomla is very proud to announce the Fireboard. Fireboard is easy to configure and to change the style of colors and fonts.