Hi all! I'm wanting to add a forum with some members-only areas, controlled by amember naturally. I'm thinking that I'll use SMF (Simple Machines Forum) since vBulletin is very expensive. However, when I search for "smf" on these forums, I don't even get a single occurance of the phrase. So, is anyone out there using amember with SMF and if so, is it good, bad or ??? Any other comments? Will I be changing over to vBulletin anyway? I guess that if the plugins had trial versions, I could probably check things out myself, but I cannot find any reference to trial versions so I'm guessing they're not available. Thanks, Mike
micsaund, Will you be using Joomla (my personal suggestion), Mambo, straight HTML, asp, other? Are your member only areas part of the forum or other parts of your site? We run vBulletin and will probably drop it soon b/c there is no reliable bridge. But we have never had a problem with the aMem - vBul plugin. AMembers' plug-in will handle registering users in your forum, and logging them in/out. Bridges, for the most part, also handle this with a few extra thigs depending on the CMS or how they're designed and used. If your're running Joomla; 90% of ppl should go with Joomlaboard. It's simple to install, fully integrated, nearly every feature you want, no extra plug-ins or bridges required, and the two guys handling it's development are starting to get things back on track with it. If you need a serious forum app capable of handling a very large and complex community; go with SMF. It can give vBul a run for it's $$ any day, plenty of free help in plenty of forums, free bridges availabe (check out joomlahacks) so you don't really need aMember's plug-in (sorry Alex ), but you may need some skill getting everything to work smoothly. If you decide on SMF, you'll never need to upgrade to vBulletin (maybe ). You sound like an eager newbie - which means you won't be a newbie long, so go with Joomla, Joomlaboard, and aMember Pro. Good Luck.
Hi 121books, I'm actually not using any kind of CMS - just raw html (actually xhtml ) that I hand coded and have a subdir of static files which are subscriber-only. I could never quite figure-out Joomla and the sections/categories/items/news/whatever hierarchy it uses when I generally only want a menu on the left, a header, and my content in the main part. That's another story, however I'm just looking to add the forums parallel to the existing site. The only integration I'd be looking for is the "single login" for paying subscribers to go between my membership-subdir and the forums. Thanks for the input regarding vB also. I'm just not sure that I need it and your input has been very useful - I think I'll go with SMF and fork-over another $40 to aMemberAlex I must say, though, that I filed a pre-sales ticket with vB and they were back to me in less than 5 mins! Perhaps I should go with a more fully-featured CMS type setup, but with this being my first "real" site, and it having existing users when I bought it, I don't want to futz with things too badly, at least initially. Mike
Hi there, found this intersting. I use VB and I find it very server intensive, but I do have a very large forum. I have just installed SMF as a test board and it's very impressive. It's fast with some great features VB is nowhere near to and the community of mods is no so political. I'm still on the old method of VB integration and my members hardly ever upgrade the right details into amember as mine has forum registration first prior to upgrade. I'm hoping if I change over Amember can get my paid members into SMF for me and then I can start all new users through the amember signup first. I thin amember is so good you have to look at building around amember plugins when chosing products. Joomla, SMF and amember is looking favourable for me at the moment and I even recently renewed my VB licence for the forum. aaahhhh If only I knew how good the others are
Hi, I know it's an old thread - "SMF" doesn't return any results I think because the search function is set to only use 4 characters and over. Admin - any chance you could reset this to 3 characters? I'm searching for SMF related topics as I'm not getting any SMF accounts created, and I'm having to search for "plugin forum", which obviously returns a LOT of posts... Regards, Andy
Tried several forum software before I went with SMF. Using it for over a year. The only time I ran into a problem was when SMF and amember did an upgrade and ran into problems with SMF plugin. Alex was very quick to modify the plugin to work with SMF upgrade. No problems since. Ann