Success Story: GIMPER.net

[GIMPER]

GIMPER.net is a forum about the Image Manipulation Software: GIMP (similar to Photoshop but open source).

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We have been existing since 2007, and a "relaunch" was long due. Until the relaunch we were using PHPBB3, but not only is the development pretty much dead and not on par with current programming standards OR forum management standards, we were also highly disappointed with the upcoming release.

We did an extensive research of existing (free and non-free) forum softwares out there and are not regretting any bit of choosing xenForo. We usually favorize vBulletin, but the recent development seems not to bring any new innovation. So even though we did favour it till the end as it supports Sphinx as a search backend, it unfortunately did not support any migration tool from PHPBB3.

To make things short, a list of why we think xenForo is awesome and should be your choice of forum software:

• technically a very high standard of implementation (even though we highly disagree with the usage of ZendFramework)
• very professional features
• very stable: it just works! As expected with no exceptions!

That being said, we were able to completely migrate from a PHPBB3 to xenForo without missing ANY information, except user permissions (but luckily it was not a big job to do manually).

We like keeping the forum simple, so there are no ads, mobile friendly and very few graphics. We are using "Snap" as a theme with our custom designed logo.

 

[Fufu]

Nice to-the-point, yet honest review.

What choice of frame work would you prefer?

 

[GIMPER]

What choice of frame work would you prefer?

If you need a full stack Framework we would recommend either symfony or laravel, but similar to ZF they are all pretty much bloated. I mean just look at the distributed ZF with xenForo it comes with a "Technorati" (pretty sure they are now defunct) library and tons of other stuff not needed. On the other hand the libraries that are needed are outdated compared to well maintained packages you might find on packagist.org.