Mambo is very easy to set up, change, update, upgrade and maintain in general. There are plug-ins (they call them “components” or “modules”) which allow you to update your site via email. Multiple server admin is, I think possible - I remember seeing it something about it on their site.
The best phpBB intergration into a CMS I have seen has been phpBB ported into phpNuke…
Another way to go would be to use phpBB as your CMS.
I’ve used phpBB and creative use of the templates system and permissons system (i.e. to stop your ‘content areas’ displaying as forums, stop random users posting to the front page etc etc) to provide a full CMS before - if done well the articles / blog side of things can appear totally seperate from your forum despite being part of the same install.
I went down this route because it seemed the best way to have the login system, permissons system, Private messages system etc all seamlesly intergrated.
Be warned though - it involves writing an alarming number of MySQL join queries (something i hate at the best of times)
The site I did the phpBB mod for is long gone unfortunatly (was a bit of a one off for the origanal series of the Big Brother TV show in the UK) but I’m planning to do this again for a Theatre realated site i’m working on at the moment - although i’m waiting for a stable release of phpBB2.2…
Some pointers or suggestions here would be good.
I’ve always come to the point that using phpBB as CMS would be great. However, the fact that I will be customizing it so much, to make it very CMS-like and to the way I like it might be a trouble when it comes to new releases of phpBB (thus wanting to update it?).
I haven’t looking around for a long time now, but I guess here’s a good place to start. I’ve been thinking of doing some new projects lately, but kinda still in the “research” process, trying put everything in place before starting off anything.
Anyway, again, some comments or suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.
Hi!
Thank you people for a good response!
This choosing the right CMS game is tricky and whichever you finaly choose it wouldn’t cover all of your needs perfectly and just the way you want it.
BUT, after some snooping around and testing i always somehow came back to XOOPS. However, their newbb and lack of real phpbb integration always turned me down, until i discovered that there actualy is a module that allows phpbb integration and people say that it works really fine. I checked sites that had that kind of integration and i was impressed because it indeed works very fine.
That’s why i finaly decided to go with xoops. It may not be the perfect option, but then again there are no any perfect options and with xoops, you can always find a workaround since there are alot of useful modules and hacks and the community is very high responsive. I can get an answer to any of my questions in minutes.
Funny thing is that after some testing on my site and asking about phpbb integration on their forums, i got convienced to use newbb instead since that is more stable option and there is a new and highly improved version coming out soon as i heard so i may actualy regret going with phpbb if it turns out newbb was a better option. However, both possibilities are open.
I can say that except petitions, all of requirements i listed there are fullfilled with xoops or can be easily added by modules and hacks. For petitions i may just open a back-end subsite meant just for petitions and the problem would be solved.
Thanks again for your response and help!
Daniel
Well the way i did it didn’t actually need modifying the phpbb code very much at all - other than the hacks i added for the forums.
I wrote a set of templates to use for the site, and then wrote some php scripts that included the phpBB files and used the phpBB functions to get the required data from the database and output it into the templates, as well as putting in the usual features like logins, posting (for comments) etc from phpBB. this just ran along side the main phpBB installation.
To upgrade phpBB would just need you to update the phpBB files and keep an eye out for any changes to the structure / functions your using in your site.
There is also an articles hack for phpBB that allows you to put an articles / content section into your phpBB installation. I think it’s here: http://phpbbhacks.com/download/1237
At the moment i’m keeping an eye on wordpress - if a way to run multiple blogs in the same installation appears, & the ability to use the log in system to allow people to log in and comment / post a new story, it would be very feasable to use this as a forums system. Would only really need some creative templating to work as well. Not as feature rich as phpBB would be, but you’d have the simplicity and elegance of wordpress on your side 
Personally i like Typo3
EGO7 has a slick offering if you are willing to go for their complete Flash CMS.
www.ego7.net gives you a pretty good idea how the community applications work in that environment.
This does not use phpbb but it does most of what you are asking for: http://phpx.org
There is Also mamboserver.com.
http://phpbbpassport.com is another cool phpbb project
Thanks for the reply, Zoo. Yep, never really thought of that. Cheers.
Interesting, will keep an eye on wordpress as well.
eZ Publish has everything you asking for already built into it. You will not have to integrate other products into so your look and feel will be consistant throught.
Plus eZ Publish has an eCommerce built into it as well. You did not mention eCommerce, but I have not found very many solutions that integrate both Community building with eCommerce.
eZ Publish has been downloaded over One Million Times. They have a great section of web sites that are using thier software.
The Link is…
Have you tried Typo3 yet. I have not been into it much and not sure about the forum intergration but it has great features and it is german!
Cheers,
Shalin
Thanks for recommendationd guys!
I know about both eZ and Typo3 since i researched a bit about them before. The problem with eZ (which does looks excellent) is that it has a commercial side to it and using the open source version would be like using a lite version of the more functionaly commercial version. Since the community i am starting is strongly about open source/free software and it’s advocacy, using semi-commercial products seems like a bad idea. And also, the forums are not what i want. I want bells and whistles and i bleieve my users would like that too. eZ forum’s appereance is not what i want.
As for Typo3, it seems to be a great CMS fully packed with features, actualy, it seems to be the most feature packed CMS i know, but it’s hardware requirements are just too high as i heard which can seriously endanger the speed and stability in some cases. Also, the fact of it being soo ‘overloaded’ with features may actualy prove bad since it may have many features i don’t really need that would be dragged through the system lessering it’s functionality. Typo3 strives to be a complete CMS for everything, but i believe it is still better to use a CMS that is more focused, in this case, to community building.
I am already using XOOPS developing my site on it, it is object oriented, completely modularized, custumizeable and also easy to use. It is also completely community portal oriented. It stands for eXtended Object Oriented Portal System.
If you’d check on my developmetn, go to www.libervis.com - ‘construction work’ is opened to public
Daniel
I’m a fan of eZpublish
http://ez.no/community
It is very easy to set up, and offers quite a lot, with easy customisation.
Tim
Anyone with eZpublish want to comment on the performance/speed of the system? I’ve heard that can be an issue with that particular application.
I’m a fan of Mambo myself. It’s so easy to use, even an idiot like me was able to create addons for it after only a short time with the system. (I didn’t know what PHP was in December.) I haven’t seen an easier installation, and installation of addons is one-click. Good community too.
-Tony
Integrating pretty much means linking the user sessions of the phpBB and the user sessions of the CMS, nothing more.
I run eZpublish on a shared server on a budget hosting plan and it has caused no problems so far.
I get about 30000 uniques per month and 100000 impressions, and have had no problems.
The site in my sig uses it.
Check out page loading speed yourself (eZpublish caches most things that are commonly used, so after the page has been rendered once, it all works quite quickly).
Tim
Hello!
I ran into some rather frustrating problems in xoops with updating modules. The problem is odd and i am investigating it on their forums, but since i can’t let something like that happens when my site would have hunderds and even thousands of members i started to search for other options again.
What i was originaly searching for opening this thread is so called communityware actualy. I was searching for a portal system that poweres exclusively COMMUNITY portals. However, many of the systems you recommended were not anyhow community oriented systems, like mambo, Typo3 etc. Those are CMS (content management systems) meant for managing content sites and not community sites.
Therefore, i may open another thread on best community-wares including and mixtures of cms and communityware.
As i realized, all nukes are blends of community-ware and CMS and to my opinion, XOOPS fork seems to be the best. But, as i heard here and somewhere else, their code isn’t the cleanses, and while it’s very easy to use it, it may not be the most stable system around. I obviously had to be the victim of that realization, thankfully, before my portal opened up it’s doors.
So, i am searching for best community-ware and communityware-cms mixtures.
Daniel
I don’t know much about Typo3, but I know Mambo is quite capable of running a community site, for example, opensourcecms.com recently switched from php-nuke to Mambo to power their site. I’m sure the same must be true for other systems that you may label as being more content oriented than community oriented. The truth is, content is content, whether it’s forum posts or news stories, or anything inbetween.
Good luck in your further searches.
-Tony
I agree with you when you say content is content, and every site needs content to survive be it community content or one-side published content in form of support documentation faq etc… things that corporate websites and business usualy publish to their customers.
I saw opensourcecms.com when it went to mambo and it looks really fine. I am aware of the mambo’s popularity and about it being a really great and quality cms.
However, there actualy is one major difference between content management in CMS and content management in community-ware portal systems and that are forums. Mambo does not have a forum integrated and there are some ‘hacks’ or modules that add forum support, but as i heard it doesn’t works very well often.
As well as in mambo’s case is in the case of practicaly all other CMS’s that are not quite community oriented. And i don’t think it’s a very good idea to force CMS that isn’t meant for community’s to work as a community tool.
Nukes are a mixture of CMS and community oriented portal system and that may just be the solution for many of us community building webmasters hence the popularity of those systems. I am simply searching for the best amongst them. I know about the top ones, but there are others that are less known such as CPG-Nuke that do the same thing and may actualy be better than any previous nuke-alike system. However, i heard that mixing CMS and community-ware is not always a good thing and that is why many nukes can be un-stable, un-complete in some manners and their ‘universe’ is so samn chaotic giving people like me a headache when you need to choose one of them.
Thanks for wishing me luck, and thank you guys for your recommendations… we as a community are learning from one another all the time, that’s the greatest spirit of internet…cooperation and sharing…That’s how it should be! 
Thank you!
Daniel
Xeliber,
First let me say, I definitely understand your standpoint. There is no one-size-fits-all CMS (whether you “c” stands for community or content!).
But I wanted to clarify something you said regarding Mambo and forums:
Mambo has two fully integrated forum components, Simpleboard (which Opensourcecms.com is using) and Loudmouth. PhpBB is available as an integrated Mambo component, though it changes some of the Mambo user tables, so it isn’t necessarily for the faint-at-heart. Also Simple Machines Forum is being integrated, and I understand that is a more full-featured than the first two I mentioned.
There has, of course, been quite a bit of interest in integrating Invision Power Board an vBulletin, though their are licensing issues with both that are apparently holding things up.
Another thing to mention if you’ve never tried out Mambo, is that installing addons is very easy, you just point the installer to the zip file, and it installs itself.
I had started to look at all the systems you’ve named when I found Mambo and stopped there. Basically, it had what I was looking for – I could just make a regular html design and turn it into a Mambo template by adding a few bits of code. Before settle on Mambo I had played with Plone quite a bit, and while it is clearly powerful, it is far from simple, and not really compatible with a shared-hosting evironment.
Whatever system you choose, I honestly do wish you luck with your site. I have a lot of fun building and running web sites and I always hope that everyone else is having fun too.
-Tony