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Best Free Forum and Best free Photo Gallery

Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 6:47 pm
by edkellett
Hi,

I recently asked about the best free Blog for a website I am building. I was delighted to learn Wordpress and thanks for those who advised me... Mow I have two more requests:

1) I am looking for an open source free Forum that is really easy to install on an existing php mysql site. Ease of install and managing is important... like Wordpress

It is for a corporate site so one that doesn't have banner ads or any garbage on it would be great...

2) In the same way I am looking for something similar for uploading Photo Galleries... something nice and stylish and that can handle large file sizes... any ideas?

Thanks in advance...

Ed Kellett

Re: Best Free Forum and Best free Photo Gallery

Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 7:58 pm
by alex.barylski
It's for a corporate site and you don't have the budget for commercial software?

Business and free go togather like water and electricity...in anycase Google...there are dozens of scripts which do what you need...figuring out which one best suits your requirements is the hard part.

Re: Best Free Forum and Best free Photo Gallery

Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 8:11 pm
by Eran
Why the dissonance, Alex? ;)
We should be embracing corporate use in open source.

For forums you have phpBB as the main candidate (though its source is not great, it is usable and easy to install). It's what runs this forum
If you've got a minor budget, vBulletin is a better alternative.

As far as Image galleries, consider hosting your images on flickr or a similar service, and embed their gallery widgets on your site.

Re: Best Free Forum and Best free Photo Gallery

Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2009 12:55 am
by matthijs
Not as well known, but wordpress has it's own forum: bbpress. It might be more basic compared to the others, but it is just as easy to install and maintain as wordpress itself. Another advantage is that both admin area's have the same look and work in about the same way. And it's possible to integrate the user base for the site and forum if you wish.
Customization of the way it looks is just a matter of changing the templates in the theme, the same way as wp does it

Re: Best Free Forum and Best free Photo Gallery

Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2009 12:47 pm
by alex.barylski
Why the dissonance, Alex?
I dunno...something about people wanting "free, free, free" bugs me. I'm sure if I walked into my local garage and asked for free breaks and tune up they'd tell me where to go. :P

It's not the open source I dislike, it's the idea of 'free as in beer' that gets me.