[Darth-Apple]

FluxBB is an extremely bare-bones, simplified forum software that takes away almost all bloat that could be conceived. It's so simple that the entire ModCP and ACP are combined into one page, but yet it works and it's easy, and it's quite refreshing really. Much less cluttered, which is nice. 

 I installed it to experiment today (was always fond of PunBB, Flux's upstream parent). It doesn't have many features, but the interface is extremely simple and clean and the ACP is extremely easy to use. It has a huge mod database for such a bare-bones software as well. Some of them look pretty interesting. 


I would never use it personally. It's a little too simple for my tastes(which is the whole point of it really), but it's perhaps the most streamlined mainstream forum software on the internet. For forums that need simplicity, it's nice. And judging by the mods, it apparently is pretty popular. 

That being said, the default theme is absolutely horrendous, but some people have come up with some nice ones.

[Guardian]

I like the simplicity of it, depending on the intended purpose of course. Looks nice enough. Never used it, or been on a forum powered on it before.

[Darth-Apple]

Yea I've never used it either. The only thing I didn't like are the constant redirects. It has essentially no ajax at all, and it's sort of annoying to always be refreshed with friendly redirect pages that take several seconds.

I sort of lament the complicatedness of new software. Xenforo has so much crazy eye-candy effects all over the place that it's almost exhausting in a way. I miss the days when the web was designed for older computers without octo-core processors and 100mbit connection speeds. We've sort of regressed in a way.

[Thomas]

I've used both it an PunBB. I really like how minimal it is but coding it is a goddamn nightmare. Everything is terribly obfuscated. Worse than Wordpress.

[Darth-Apple]

Just took a look at the code. They aren't even using a template engine... The HTML is straight up embedded right in the PHP files. That's kinda a bad thing to do.

And yea, Wordpress is an absolute pain in the a** to code for. I'm not a huge fan of overusing frameworks and all sorts of other stuff, although I suppose it makes sense for Wordpress. In general it just adds a learning curve to try to figure out the software when things could easily be done a more straightforward way.

MyBB, for example, puts every page in its own .php file and puts all auxilliary initialization into a global.php file that's included by every single page. So each page ONLY needs the code that pertains to that page, and nothing else. There are a ton of PHP files on the forum root directory (memberlist.php, member.php, index.php, forumlist.php, and so forth), but it's very easy a developer to see the file and immediately know what it does. Sadly, code isn't written this way anymore. These days everything is just buried deep into several directories of libraries and complex include paths, and the controllers are obscure and make it impossible to figure out what page corresponds to what file/function/include/whatever.

[Thomas]

Just took a look at the code. They aren't even using a template engine... The HTML is straight up embedded right in the PHP files. That's kinda a bad thing to do.

It is? That's pretty standard operating procedure.

[Darth-Apple]

Usually they use a template engine to store the HTML separately from the PHP code. This allows themes to change the HTML structure without editing core code. Some softwares use advanced template engines (such as Twig), while others sort of use more bare-bones approaches (MyBB for example).

I've done quite a few PHP projects at university. We always did our own template engine. I will probably post a tutorial for it at some point (it's about 50 lines, which is not bad). In general, the more it's separated, the better the customizability is from a theme standpoint. I'm not a huge fan of advanced template engines, but the simple ones are very easy to implement.

For simple scripts that don't need a lot of customization, the built in approach works. For FluxBB, it's enough, simplicity is their goal.