Today is Halloween here in the United States, so I figured to celebrate the holiday, I would switch from the usual content post and instead solicit input from the WordPress Hacks readership.   I enjoy doing this from time to time to see what kind of discussion we can get going and the comment often end up offering a wealth of knowledge. 

The question for today is for our readers who either run their own forums or enjoy visiting and commenting on forums.   Which forum software do you prefer?  Do you prefer PHPBB forums or VBulletin forums?  

I’ve always loved forums because an active forum allows you to interact with a large number of people and get help quicker than commenting on a post or even doing a Google search (sometimes).  I actually have experience being an administrator and a user of both forum types.    Here is my experience with both types:

PHPBB Forums

PHPBB Pros

• FREE. 
• Easy to setup.
• Easy for just about anyone to use. 

PHPBB Cons

• Options are limited.
• Not very SEO friendly (as of version 3.0).

VBulletin Forums

VBulletin Pros

• Generally better looking.
• More features. 
• Plugins/Addons available.
• More SEO friendly than PHPBB

VBulletin Cons

• Costs $100-$180.00 per license. 
• Constant Maintenance/Updates required.
• Targeted by Spammers.

Both forum types have skins available for free and for sale, so I didn’t mention that above.  It is also important to mention that you can easily convert your PHPBB forum into a VBulletin forum (I’ve read this, haven’t personally tried it).

In summary, as a user, I’ve always felt that to be considered a serious forum, you need to be using VBulletin.  It just looks more professional, has more options, etc.   From an administrator’s standpoint, however, I’ve enjoyed running PHPBB forums more.   VBulletin forums seem to attract a ton of spammy posts and sometimes moderating posts and banning users can be overwhelming (in my experience) and I feel like I have to update the software every few weeks.  It also seems to almost have to many options! 

So that is my experience with both PHPBB and VBulletin.   I would love to hear about your experiences and preferences between the two.  Have any pros or cons to add to the list?  You can write from the perspective of running either type of forum or from the user perspective (reading/posting) on either type of forum.  If you haven’t used either, you are welcome to share your experiences with BBPress.

Long ago, back when WordPress 2.0 was released, the concept of author/user roles was introduced to the WordPress community.  The problem I’ve always had is that these roles are pre-defined, meaning I can’t let a contributor upload photos, etc.

If you run a multi-author weblog, you may be interested in a WordPress plugin called the Role Manager plugin.  With this plugin, you can control what each role can and cannot do!

Update: As of January 1, 2009, it looks like Revolution/StudioPress Themes are no longer free to download.  They are all now available individually for $59.95 or all themes for $149.95.

Last month we wrote about Brian’s huge announcement that Revolution was going open source.  At that time, the original launch date was scheduled for November 1st, but in the time since then the entire Revolution team has come together and managed to get Revolution 2 ready for an early launch!

As of today, Revolution 2 is officially available to the WordPress Community.  Included with the Revolution 2 launch are 8 incredible new themes (10 if you count the two blog theme variants) which were designed to fill a large number of different niches.  So far the choices include magazine themes, professional themes, media themes, photo themes, video themes, and even blog themes.   Best of all, they are available to download completely FREE!

What is the catch?  Well, there isn’t one.  The themes are 100% free, but there is a small fee attached to any extras you may want.  With purchase of either the yearly pro membership, or the pro plus lifetime membership (Revolution all-inclusive package owners already have this), you will get the following benefits:

• Unlimited support answered by our experts
• Learn customization techniques with our detailed theme tutorials
• Professional design services available by our list of recommended designers
• Discounted general consulting rates
• Increase your search rankings with a link from the Revolution site directory

Here are the Revolution themes which were included with the original launch of Revolution Two:

Revolution Magazine Themes

Revolution Church Theme

• 3-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Lifestyle Theme

• 3-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Media Themes

Revolution Charred

• 2-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Chrome

• 2-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Photos Themes

Revolution Album Theme

• 2-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Black Canvas Theme

• 2-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Professional Themes

Revolution Office

• 2-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Video Themes

Revolution Video

• Built for embedding videos
• 2-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Blog Themes

Revolution Elements Theme

• 2-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

Revolution Blue (also available in Red & Grey)

• 3-Column Fixed Width Theme
• Widget Ready

License for this theme ($59.95), All Themes license ($149.95)

Source/Demo | Download

After looking around, I am already very impressed with how the site is setup and can see just how this site will grow in time to be a focal point in the WordPress community.   If you read the new Revolution feed, you’ll also see me in there regularly, as I have joined the Revolution joined the Revolution 2 team.

What do you think of this new business model?  Will it replace the current premium WordPress themes market in your opinion, or will you still be willing to spend your money when themes of this quality are available completely free?

Over the past few years a number of WordPress plugins have been created to generate and display related posts for single pages of your blog.   The original Related Posts plugin is still my favorite because it uses the post titles to determine which posts are related, but this plugin requires you to log in to CPanel and make some adjustments there (instructions on how to do this in the linked post above).

Another very comparable related post plugin is Related Posts 2.3, which was created after WordPress 2.3 added tags to the core software.   In addition to matching up related posts by your tags, it also displays related posts in your feed (the first one I mentioned doesn’t do this on its own).  This is of course only useful if you tag your posts responsibly, so it may not be a viable option for most people who treat tags as (meta) keywords.

If neither of these plugins fit your needs, there is a new plugin available which displays related posts by category.  It does require WordPress 2.3 or higher to use.

According to the author of this new plugin:

The WordPress-Plugin Related Posts by Category lists similar posts within any article. As a search string the plugin does not use the title of the article nor weighs the content. In fact the category, which was assigned to the post, serves as the source of accordance. The reason for that: Posts from an equivalent category have most of the time identical topics and can therefore be seen as absolute relevant. Is an article assigned to more than one category, all of those categories will be used for the database query. Obviously this leads to more results.

This plugin requires the same responsibility as the tag one, though people are generally more disciplined with their categories than they are with tagging posts (because tags double as meta tags usually), hopefully making the resulting posts more relevant with this plugin.

Some of our long time readers may remember last April when we wrote a post about Technorati wanting you to upgrade your WordPress installation.   In that post, we explained that Technorati will no longer be indexing your site if you have an old installation of WordPress running on your blog.   This is of course due to the major security vulnerabilities on some old WordPress installations.   Unfortunately this announcement didn’t get much attention, as Technorati has failed to grow with the blogging community and has basically become irrelevant over the past year.

With that said, for those of you on old WordPress installations, maybe this will be a bigger incentive to upgrade?   According to Quick Online Tips, it looks like Google has begun warning users of WordPress 2.1.1 via their Google Webmaster Tools of the security vulnerability of this version.   If this is successful, Google will then expand to notifying webmasters of other vulnerable WordPress installations, as well as other blogging platforms.   Note: This does not affect WordPress.com users, as your sites are automatically upgraded for you.

Why is this important?  I believe that it is conceivable that eventually Google could not index your sites that are using a version of WordPress that are considered unsafe.  This is because these blogs are targeted by hackers and inappropriate content or malicious code is often placed on these sites.  Google does not want these types of sites in their index.

I know there are a few of you out there that don’t necessarily upgrade your WordPress installations.   Will WordPress 2.7’s easy upgrade process help you to upgrade your installations regularly?