Web Development

Hi all ! I will be very happy if I can get your valuable response, regarding forum software installation.

Let me come to topic, In our institute we have planned to launch forum, which will be used by students and scientists, within intranet., I just gone through MyBB, PHPBB3 and fluxBB, which i could find on google, and I installed as well, if you have any better suggestion please let me know, and this forum will be used by our 4 branch office in India, with strength of around 500 each, and forum is to discuss and solve problem on Ocean science. By the way which software is installed in our forum ?

I installed on following environment, I never used any forum software, in past so which software should I finalize ? Is there any better software than which I installed.

Code:

Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1225 V2 (3.20 GHz, 8M Cache)
8GB DDR3 UDIMM Memory, 1600MHz, Non-ECC
500GB 7200 RPM 3.5'' SATA3 Hard Drive
OS : Centos 6.4 64-bit

mysql> \s
--------------
mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.6.16, for Linux (i686) using  EditLine wrapper

Connection id:		2
Current database:	
Current user:		akshay@localhost
SSL:			Not in use
Current pager:		stdout
Using outfile:		''
Using delimiter:	;
Server version:		5.6.16 Source distribution
Protocol version:	10
Connection:		Localhost via UNIX socket
Server characterset:	utf8
Db     characterset:	utf8
Client characterset:	utf8
Conn.  characterset:	utf8
UNIX socket:		/home/akshay/Packages_External/mysql-5.6.16/CUSTOM_DB_USER/socket
Uptime:			6 min 46 sec

$ php -v
PHP 5.5.9 (cli) (built: Feb 23 2014 03:00:50) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies

Cheers,
Akshay

A forum is less about hardware or software and is more about building a community. Having said that:

Linux is fine (LAMP). The details are not so important without any usage stats, and since you have no users, worrying about CPUs, etc. is really not important. It's easy to move from one server to another.

The forum software should be supported by a large, activity community and have an extensible system (plugins, etc.). We went with vBulletin many years ago, but I don't recommend it now because I newer versions are far too "bloated" and I don't think you should start with some older, unsupported legacy version.

Having said that, I still like our vB 3.8 system and would not change our forum to another software, because we have many years developing code and plugins for it.

So, whatever you should, you should choose some modern LAMP forum software you like that has a large community of users and plugin developers; and has a fully open extensible system you can modify, install plugins / add-ons, and easily write your own code extensions as required.

Hey Akshay,

Since you are keen on ocean science and oceanography, I thought you might enjoy looking at this new project I've created for tidal stations:

Basically, I've mapped our tidal database to Google Maps for the entire world of around 7000 tidal stations. Here is the one for SE Asia that includes India:

Tidal Stations (East and SE Asia)

This is only my first map, so it's only beta as I add more features and stations.

If you click on any tidal station, you will be taken back to our forums to a page that displays a tide chart and a tide table that high and low tide info, sunrise, sunset, the phase of the moon and percent illumination of the moon.

Hey Neo, this is something great, how you could do this ? actually I have some data on mysql database, but being beginner of php I really don't know how to create map using google map and then plotting data on click. please tell me some source from where I can learn this. You are awesome php programmer boss, I really loved your message on #3, now I don't get peace until I plot like you from data which I am having

Thanks for the useful info..

Cheers,
Akshay