It isn’t often that I take the time to give kudos to the software I use, despite being as militant as I am for open source. For the past few years I have been attempting to use as much open source as possible without giving into proprietary stuff. For the most part, open source wins.

There’s several pieces of community software that I have built sites on these days. Most of which I have actually used here on the web hosting community forums as well, albeit temporarily.

There’s a few that I’m going to be detailing today including phpBB, Vanilla, punBB and SMF (SimpleMachines). Each piece of software has it’s benefits and drawbacks, hopefully you’ll find this post remotely useful.

Starting with the one I’d consider the underdog…

PunBB
PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

Success.
And they succeed at their mission. PunBB is very lightweight right out of the starting gate & for a basic community. The PunBB site features a great set of addons, plugins and frequent software and security updates. One aspect that I especially liked was a feature on their site named ‘SpinkBB’ which allows you to easily create a custom color scheme with minimal effort.

The underlying drawbacks I found about PunBB though was that it was almost too minimal. Many basic features seemed to be lacking but if the forum wasn’t for my business site, I would have continued to use it for personal use. PunBB does a great job at what it intends to do: lightweight ass-kicking.

PunBB Official Site
Official PunBB Forums

The next forum up is one of my favorites despite my inability to use it, at all.

Vanilla
Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!

Vanilla is one of those forums that you simply want to use. It’s minimalistic, absolutely stunning and basic enough that anyone can wield it. There’s a massive range of extensions and an absolutely gorgeous site for fetching them. The man behind Vanilla is Canadian as well, maybe that’s why I have some odd inextinguishable desire to have Vanilla’s babies.

However that’s where the love stops. Actually, that’s right where the abuse started. Vanilla is great if you wish to continue using it in it’s vanilla form or with any of the ‘released’ themes. Customizability, though?

Vanilla drawbacks
Vanilla has a stunning plugin system, a diverse range of themes developed for it but it’s theming and template system is absolutely horrendous. I have used many, many forum systems prior and had no problems making minor tweaks, fiddling and all-in-all surviving in the code (despite having zero coding ability). Vanilla on the other hand, despite reading the documentation and spending a few days digging around on the official forum left me dazed and confused.

It may be far too advanced for me or things are just in general obfuscated. I couldn’t get even the smallest changes implemented without an outright desire to drive myself off the nearest cliff. Since I’m in Toronto the trek to the nearest cliff would be several hours. Nonetheless, I was willing and ready to make the trip.

Vanilla is one of those systems you want to love but know you’ll end up in ruins as an alcoholic after attempting to wield it for long. A ten in my book.. for the masochist.

Get Vanilla
Official Vanilla Forums

Onwards!

phpBB
Millions of people use phpBB on a daily basis, making it the most widely used opensource bulletin board system in the world. Whether you want to stay in touch with a small group of friends or are looking to set up a large multi-category board for a corporate website, phpBB has the features you need built in.

phpBB is hard to deny in the open source community. It’s one of those forums that have been around and is older than rocks, it’s frequently updated and there’s a gigantic plethora of addons, plugins and themes available for it solely due to it’s age. It’s great, usable and the latest version really does have a lot to offer as a forum.

One of my own problems I have with phpBB though is my security concerns. As a piece of software it’s been around for such a long time that with all of it’s past, I simply can’t trust it to build a community on. With the past phpBB team’s delays and insane amounts of exploits being released for it… ah. But it’s hard denying such beauty — the latest version of it had an insane amount of effort put into it and is one of the most usable pieces of forum software out there today.

Even if you don’t consider using it on a long-term basis I would recommend at least giving it a try.
phpBB Official Site
phpBB Community

SimpleMachines
SMF can trace its roots all the way back to a perl powered message board, YaBB. After awhile, there became a demand for a php coded version of YaBB. So that is where YaBBSE comes into play. While YaBBSE was getting bigger and bigger, there were certain aspects of it that just needed improvement and reworking. The decision was made that it was best to separate from YaBBSE because it was a lot different from YaBB and it was best to start from scratch. At this point, SMF started being developed. On September 29th, 2003, the first beta of SMF was released to charter members, SMF 1.0 Beta 1. While this was a huge milestone for SMF, only charter members had access to use it. But on March 10, 2004, SMF made its public debut with the first public SMF release available to everyone.

Last but certainly not least, SimpleMachines. SimpleMachines or SMF for short (Simple Machines Forum) is my favorite of all of the available software out there today. It’s a great mix of usability and features, all the while still offering easy customization and addons.

While I admit I do find it a bit bulky and the ‘default’ template leaves a lot to be desired, I love it. Best of all? The community behind the system. Recently I had the opportunity to spend about 48 hours on their forum while a few of their team members made great efforts helping me move data from one old version of another forum (IPB) to SMF.

The process was not easy by any means and as it was one of my first times really digging into simplemachines from a technical standpoint, quite frankly it went horribly. Nonetheless their team was behind me 100% and even offered to help dig in on their own and spend their own time getting it up and running: To me, that tells me they’re both confident with their software and care about the community enough to help get new folks using it.

Kudos SimpleMachines.
Official SimpleMachines Site
Official SimpleMachines Community

Building communities isn’t the easiest thing to do but with free, open source software out there like the ones detailed above it certainly takes a lot of weight off our shoulders.

Thank you for all of the great work developers!
Keep it up

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We live in an odd society. Exploring the city I frequently come across baristas attempting to pawn off $7 cups of water that’s filtered dirt, $5 cookies and I’m barraged with ads forcing $400 pieces of plastic that output audio down my throat.

Service, at least on the internet, has become almost free. Daily I see advertisements for web hosting for mere pennies a month (See: Reality check for web hosting clients everywhere) that include 24×7 support, promises of hand holding, a free carwash and millions of dollars in google ad credits!

What a deal! At least you believe so, initially. The trouble with these sorts of providers is they’re either really selling themselves short, thirsty for market share or that’s really all their services are really worth. Eek, on thoughts of the latter.

Not so long ago I was contacted privately by a client who truly concerned we were selling ourselves short — after all, how can such great service be had for mere pennies? (32 cents a day, if you’re on our fused1 package in fact.)

Quite frankly, I would agree with him and his concerns. Service most certainly isn’t free and quality support requires constant investment and sacrifice. In essence the price our clients pay isn’t for the hosting. Still our pricing model is considered very inexpensive compared to a large amount of the providers out there and we’ll be making modifications soon to correct that substantially.

No, prices aren’t rising but we’ll be launching a new set of packages when we finally find some time!
For now, back to the hiring process..

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Prior to our little teensy, tiny data-loss here on the blog (I had multiple incremental backups but I was too lazy to actually restore them) I had made a post about about myself being interviewed on a couple of different sites. First and foremost I was recently interviewed by a client of Fused Network on his blog, Linux Tech Daily.

Rich wrote an interview for me to fill out about open source and it’s role in Fused Network and my own life. I happily obliged and wrote a thorough response, the final version you can see here: An interview with Fused Network’s David McKendrick.

He also took the time to write up two exceptional articles on finding a new web hosting provider:
Finding a good webhost
Finding a good webhost: Part 2, Fused Network

I also did an embarrassing interview with Webhostingunleashed and I’ve learned my lesson about keeping my mouth shut when I’ve got nothing good to say: Interview with David of Fused Network

(Okay, so it’s not that bad.)
It’s more fun than writing ticket responses at the very least

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Another year has gone by & we’re left holding the confetti from the years’ past. There’s been some amazing developments occurring under the hood that are slowly closing in on launch. Slowly, of course. That’s how we roll!

As surprising as it is we were just short of hitting one of our goals this year — we were just short of our goal of hosting 1,000 domain names by January first. Instead we arrived at a nice even 800, up by about 600 since the beginning of 2007. (Honestly, I’m ecstatic about it nonetheless. I always set lofty goals so even just grasping a sliver of the original target is wonderful)

Now some of you may be wondering where I’ve been! During the past couple of weeks I’ve been hiding out in Florida taking some much needed time off but at the same time solidified some upcoming changes & plans.

Hey, where are semi-dedicateds, David?!
First off, I’m sure a number of you are asking “Where are semi-dedicated packages, you’ve been talking about them since June!”. I’ll admit we dropped the ball on launching our semi-dedicated packages, while they’re essentially available (and we’ve got two servers handling clients for them) we still have yet to launch the packages.

The primary reason is a decent one though, I want to get our site ‘in tune’ with our new offerings before launching them. There’s a number of different key areas that are currently being updated including a content overhaul — the new site will contain more information about our team, infrastructure & what really makes us different from other providers.

The other half of it is that I’ve been absolutely swamped with keeping existing clients satisfied (hey, a 3 minute response time average isn’t something to brag about but it’s decent!) & new ones content with our service. It doesn’t give me all that much time to devote to new development.

There’s a number coming in 2008 though, I’ll avoid tossing out time estimations but we’ve got a new cPanel theme in development, a site overhaul, new packages coming & some other goodies in store.

What’s the plan, stan?
First up on the chopping block are our current packages. We intend on splitting our offering into two different tiers at the moment — both business & personal. I’m also (slowly) getting to work on a new ‘blog hosting’ offering that has been on the backburner for a year. We’re about 6 years late to the blog hosting industry, but better late than never

Second of all we’ve been preparing to hire new representatives. We’re finally at that ‘breaking point’ where we can afford to dish out some funds for some new blood here at Fused. As we continue to overhaul our primary site you’ll see new information going up about our available careers — I’m really excited about the opportunities we’ll be offering soon.

There’s a tonne getting done & just all stewing together. I’m looking forward to it!

On the plate:

• Affiliate program overhaul — Cleaning up the semantics, setting up a more competitive offering & new ‘charity tallies’ so users can see how they stack up against others in the system (optional).
• Site overhaul — tonnes of new information being made available, new tools & hopefully an easy-to-use template system
• Knowledgebase Updates — We understand the importance of our knowledgebase and how unfun it is to use. An overhaul is expected soon.

We’ve also been completing an awful lot of custom development within the control panel. We’ve got new pretty little uptime & trend graphs available (already completed, just waiting to be inputted!) for shared and dedicated users. Once the new control panel theme is ready we’ll be implementing them.

So while I’ve been silent on a number of key development topics as of late (Ruby on Rails, Semi-dedicated packages, etc.) know it’s moving forward. Hopefully we’ll add some manpower before February and kick it into action a bit faster!

There’s lots coming, stick around for the show!

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Well our giveaway is finally complete & the total numbers have been tallied. While the amounts for each non-profit organization aren’t available yet, I should have them all calculated by the end of the week.

In total, we ended up netting $664.38 to give away. The majority of our clients opted into providing it to the Salvation Army, which I certainly have no qualms with! In total there were 4 different organizations selected. While I do think this year was a success, I initially expected a tad bit more (given our monthly new sales revenue trend) but failed to take into account the holidays!

During the holidays the internet slows to a crawl — our sales included. While our operation doesn’t rely on them all that much — our months before were 3x-5x the amount! Next year, we’ll have this in November instead

Overall, it was a success. Helping those in need — even in smaller amounts — is still helping those in need. Thank you to all who contributed & expected some more thorough updates soon!

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