bbPress is safe but it’s not easy for newbies
bbPress was made by the developers of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg being the main person behind this project. bbPress is a forum software that can be easily integrated with wordpress if it is placed in the same folder in which wordpress is placed, else integration becomes a little harder but it can be done. My forum is also powered by bbPress and it does a good job, but that does not mean it does not need more development, there are some bugs that need to be fixed.
I did a lot of searching inside the bbPress source and found that unless a code which was modified is installed on your server, there is not much to worry about getting hacked. But still there is one exploit which may come after installing Allow Images script (hey, I am just telling, I am not sure if it’ll come) and the problem that may come is cookie theft, but even if you’re cookie gets stolen, all you have to do is log out and login. If you want to be safe, be sure you install plugins only from the bbpress.org website, don’t take it from any other source no matter what it claims.
Another good thing about bbPress is that it is free, unlike other forum systems like vBulletin. You won’t have to take the software from insecure Warez sites and you won’t go to jail if you use it. bbPress is released under the GPL license, so it can be used freely for commercial purposes but you are not allowed to modify the code.
This is all the good part of this software but there is another side to it, it’s not that simple, especially while integration with Wordpress which is placed in another folder. Practically I had to do a lot of work inorder to integrate and I am good in PHP, but what about the people who have no idea about PHP? Well they will not be able to integrate these two very well. If you don’t have to integrate then all you have to do is edit the config-sample.php file and rename it to config.php (You’ll have to enter details like Mysql user name, password, database etc..).
December 12th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
[...] and being an admin. I was recommend to use Simple Machines Forum — SMF by Prathik over at the Tech36 blog. So far its pretty easy to use. The set up (I did it with out Fantastico) was pretty [...]
February 6th, 2008 at 3:01 am
[...] and being an admin. I was recommend to use Simple Machines Forum — SMF by Prathik over at the Tech36 blog. So far its pretty easy to use. The set up (I did it with out Fantastico) was pretty [...]