The Site With the Lamp

February 7, 2005

Today's chosen victim for this serial software killer is FudForum. As with mambo the other day the first impressions are none to good. The download includes only a handfull of files and one of them is a 1.4Mb php script. No wonder they need to have a section in the installation guide about coping with a low memory limit.

The installer wanted me to enter the database and administrator password in a textfield instead of a password field. This is exactly the way that mambo behaved. It's amazing how developers spend so much time polishing the UI but don't bother to use a password field. At least both systems had more sense than to save the password in plain text. I have seen a $1000 mail system that does that, even vpopmail saves the password in plain text by default.

The admin section has a lot of functionality you could control a lot of things with that but it's not very pleasent on the eye. The template editing system certainly leaves a lot to be desired. In fact the whole template system is a bit off putting, particularly if you are someone who hates templating engines (with good reason).

This project goes into the back burner for the moment till I check out some of the other options including PHPBB2.