Hi,

I've been looking to at several PHP based bulletin board/message board/forum software and was wondering how the silverstripe forum module compares to vBulletin.

I'm looking for a forum designed using MVC. I've played with vBulletin and found it lacking when it comes to customizing templates since they are stored in a database, and the code is rather messy and its not really intuitive in this regard. Its seems like the code has been massaged/glued together to work. vBulletin does have a vast feature set.

Has anyone used both? Thoughts? Feature wise?

Thanks!

Well I basically need the forums to be customized and embedded in the site. The site user login would be shared/the same for the forum (single sign on). What I don't like about vBulletin is that the template code is actually in the database as well as the css, which makes it tedious to edit/preview and integrate.

I'm thinking it was designed that way so the user could roll back to defaults, but I would prefer a templating engine like PHPTal or Smarty built with an MVC framework (Symfony/Zend) to make it easier to customize. CMS would be a plus.

A quick google search points to the RedBB project (http://www.redbb.org/projects/) which is based on Zend but I don't think its been released yet.

Maybe there is something available for Ruby. I've been considering learning the language, though the lack of semicolon to terminate the line is a turn off. :/