phpbb is a great little forum system. It was the first forum system that i was introduced to. I have currently made the transition to SMF but phpbb has its purpose.

phpbb and SMF are very similar, it depends purely on the purpose of the forum to which system you will choose.

I used phpbb for the Science Department website that i did. I choose phpbb for 2 reasons. Firstly, phpbb is easier to administer which is essential when your clients are not experience with forum maintainence. Due to the nature of my frontpage template, an integrated SMF template caused far too many CSS errors. Therefore, the option was for a stand alone forum. I find that phpbb is a better system for stand alone forum.

Why do i believe that phpbb is a better stand alone forum than SMF? The structure of phpbb is more user friendly. Everything is relatively larger and more spaced out but still highly functional and complex. With this efficient use of space - functionality; phpbb maximises its user interface. This structure is filtered through all the layers of the phpbb forum. The main forum page is easy to naviagate. The posting system is extremely simple but still providing all the necessary funtions: BB code (font colours, boldness, italics, images, url, etc), stickying, announcing, deleting, posting.

The moderator panel also has the easy user interface as the other areas. It is extremely easy for a moderator to delete groups of posts, split, move etc.

The real benefit of phpbb is the administration panel. It expands over your entire screen so you can more easily navigate each section which is divided into logical categories. Each individual function is clear and simply to understand. For example, the process of banning someone - you go to Ban control - then find the username with the search feature. Simple!

Personally, my favourite aspect of phpbb is the ease of which you can manipulate it. Unlike SMF, phpbb can be prodominatly edited with the design view feature in Macromedia Dreamweaver. This is a fantastic feature if your web abilities are limited or you can to save time.

Choose phpbb if you want:-

-A stand alone forum
-A client has limited administration experience
-Your members have limited forum experience
-You want to easily edit the structure of the template

I agree. Phpbb was my 1st forum and definitely my favorite its free and looks professional and theres heaps of styles out there. And the admin panel is very easy to navigate. Its also extremely easy to install. Ive never had a single problem with it.

I'm looking forward to phpBB3 being released. Up to RC7 at this point. It is probably plenty stable by now. Perhaps I should add this version and get all the styles entered into the Gallery.

It is too bad that the phpBB community is so strict about linking to other sites. Last time I tried to let people know about Themebot in the forums, my post was removed immediately. Most likely, none of the style authors even know Themebot exists.

I am looking forward to phpbb3 also. I have been testing it extensively lately, in unison with the new Joomla 1.5 - phpbb3 bridge beta from http://rocketwerx.com - uniting, now 2 of my favourite Open Source Softwares.

The improvements in phpbb3 are amazing, the different between 2 and 3 are astonishing, to say the very least. I would dare to say, that phpbb3 currently, offers a much better arrange of features and functionality than SMF does at present. Everything from the new admin panel, user controls and such really complete the new version as something great