[SOLVED] forum for education

[jason]

We are zimbra5.0.7NE customers, so I am always on this forum. So an off topic question, but one for education: Zimbra and linuxquestions.org use the same forum product. Can you tell me what it is? The quality and power of it is amazing. Would like to have the same power for my district and staff. Thank you

[administrator]

We use vbulletin with many many many customizations.

[jason]

got it... thank you. Wish it was FOSS, but for $180 to own it it seems worth it.

[dNb]

Originally Posted by jason

The quality and power of it is amazing. Would like to have the same power for my district and staff. Thank you

Just a quick warning from a fellow Edu site: evaluate the product from an admin perspective before you consider buying it. I agree it is pretty spiffy from a user's view, but...

We purchased it and found that a) it was heinous to admin (everything is a point-and-click-fest in a convoluted gui w/no real hooks to be able to automate certain tasks you would want to do in an edu environment) and b) it doesn't have LDAP (or at least didn't) support for authorization. We went so far as to write a bunch of code to try and get around these shortcomings. We got a beta in front of our users and had to pull it back and declare the project a failure. I'm still smarting from the experience.

I suspect it works well for an relatively self-contained forum like this one, but if you are looking for something that integrates with your other systems or has any level of automation available, be sure to take a hard look at the product first.

-- dNb

P.S. Unfortunately, I still haven't found a good package that would serve in its place. Anyone have any suggestions?

[natrixgli]

I really like Fireboard component for Joomla. It's quite nice. I also liked SMF back in the day (Simple Machines Forum). If you aren't using Joomla, it really isn't that much work to set it up so you could use it just for your forums (and maybe some other useful Joomla comps as well)

Fireboard: Best of Joomla! The #1 joomla templates, resources and extentions
SMF: Home of SMF: Free PHP and MySQL forum software

Both of these are FOSS.

I also found this: ForumMatrix - Compare Them All

A comparison of forum software. Haven't tried it so YMMV.

Cheers,

-n8