miniBB
This forum script makes an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to actually integrate a simple forum into their web site so that it appears to be a proper part of the site itself.
My Rating: 
Pros
- Can easily be customised to integrate it into any web site my making simple changes to two HTML files (one for the header and one for the footer) and the CSS file.
- Provides a number of add-ons that provide parts of the functionality that not everyone needs and an online 'compiler' that allows you to easily get a copy that just contains the add-ons you actually need making for a smaller script.
- Manually installing extra add-ons after the initial install is relatively simple if you follow the instructions.
- The script supports regular forums, read only forums and private forums all at once simply by entering the forum numbers into arrays as explained in the manual.
Cons
- The user manual is written in broken English making it harder to understand than if it were written in proper English.
- The JavaScript the forum uses is extremely antiquated and doesn't work properly in all modern browsers.
- While most of the add-ons just worl as expected when you install them, some obviously haven't been updated in a long time. For example the news feed add-on appears to have been written with the expectation that register globals would be turned on and therefore does not work with PHP 4.2+ unless you rewrite several sections of the code - in fact almost everything I have found that doesn't work with this script has turned out to be because of this add-on.
- When URL is inserted into a post using bbcode the URL is not converted back to bbcode when you edit the post.
Review
I looked at several different forum scripts before selecting this one to use with my new web site at javascriptexample.net. The reasons why I chose this particular forum script rather than an alternative such as phpBB is because this script is designed in a way that only provides the bells and whistles that you actually need rather than all of the ones that someone might want. The number of database tables it uses is a small fraction of those used by other forum scripts. The files you need to update yourself to integrate the forum properly into your web site is fairly minimal. There is even an add-on for integrating it into sites that already have their own login process so that loggin into the site will automatically log into the forum and only those with a site login can login to the forum.
The far smaller number of files that this script has compared to other forum scripts makes it far easier to find the spots to put any changes that you need that are not covered by the base script and the available add-ons. The script doesn't make it quite as clear as it could as to which files need to be updated whenever a new version is to be installed and which can be safely amended when you customise the script for your own use. Also there is no built in update processing that will just update the files needing to be changed.
The one thing that the script is missing from what I have seen so far is the ability to do delayed posts when you have an announcements/read only forum. If it had that functionality along with a news feed script that actually works properly then it could reasonably be used as an integrated blog replacement as well as being used as a forum.
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