User Support Forum

I'm looking into the possibilty of using a bulletin board as part of our internal website.

Do you have any recommendations?

Pitfalls?

What to do/not do?

I see that you're using PhPBB. We're running FreeBSD as the OS and apache as the web server.

Any insights you can provide are appreciated.

AdvanceThanks,
Jeff

I'd highly recommend phpbb. I've tried several messageboards (ikonboard, snitz forum, phorum, UBB, et al.), including a couple of homebrew solutions I cooked up, but phpbb does everything I need it to and more. I did have to hack on it some to get it to do a couple of things I wanted (mainly removed some unwanted registration options and added some special fields that were not part of the generic setup), but that wasn't terribly difficult if you're not afraid of getting your hands dirty in the code, and the documentation on their website was good. The phpbb community is even better - you can pretty much get the answer to any question you may have on their support forum.

If you are considering using a CMS like phpnuke, phpwebsite, or postnuke, I believe there are easy ways to integrate phpbb right into the CMS. I didn't look into that as much.

Plus, you can't beat the price.

You may also look into a wiki. I've got one set up on our internal website (currently on IIS, but, like powerchurch.com, that's changing too - I've got a gentoo server compiling away as I type). We use it to share documents so that anyone can edit them if necessary. We're currently using OpenWiki (ASP/Access), but we're going to be using PHPWiki (PHP, obviously/MySQL) on the new server. We find that to be useful and convenient for a lot of our support documents and general inhouse information.

Thanks!

I'll be trying this on a development box shortly.

What I want to do is setup something for the staff to use internally.

We need something like a message board for people in the hospital, who's gonna visit them, when they were visited last, etc.

-Jeff

phpbb may be overkill for just that, but if you want to use it for other things, you'll be able to.