I’ve been pulling my hair out for weeks trying to decide which way to go.
One of my LAMP sites is several years old and my users have requested a forum. My site is custom-built by myself, and the forum would have to integrate fully with my site so that it actually looks, feels, and behaves like my site. For example, I have a site-wide messaging system on my site that alerts users whenever they receive a new message no matter where on my site they are on, so this feature would have to be extended to the Forum.
The question is, do I use an existing forum platform and integrate it with my site or do I just build one from scratch?
The pros/cons are relatively obvious, but I can’t decide which way to go and it’s crunch time.
The pros of using an existing open-source platform is that they are tried and tested, secure, have a lot of built-in features, community support, and would save me a lot of time.
The cons are that they seem to severely limit how tightly and well I can integrate it with my site and my site’s features. All the forum packages I have looked at (and I’ve looked at MANY), are all front-end solutions that will behave like an external add-on to my rather than an integral part of it. I have not found any fully-customizable “backend” forum solutions.
Building the forum from scratch means I need to re-invent the wheel with all the potential problems that might raise, but on the other hand, I can program the forum so that it does everything exactly the way I need it to, making it an integral part of my site rather than an external add-on to it.
So, what do you recommend and why?
Surely life is too short to build Yet Another Forum? In the long term, will it really matter if it’s less than 100% to your preferences?
I do sympathise, being a bit of perfectionist myself, but really I would be advising against a self-build in this case.