I have been trying to find a forum software I really like. I used phpbb for a few, but have not been all that happy. I tried Vanilla and like it overall, but it seems to have some issues, like for example with incompatible plug-ins and absent plug in’s it isn’t all that powerful. So I tried this comparison site http://www.forummatrix.org/. It is pretty good. It compares and contrasts between a number of the popular programs so that you can pick. I found mybb this way and it looks quite good so far.

As you know we are a big fan of shared work on the net. Someone today pointed out a PHP mail form handler script that appears to be drafted with some thought to avoiding spam, serves as a nice replacement for Matt’s Old Perl Formmail Script and even helps you to configure itself.

I have not examined the coding, but they certainly address many of the issues I would be concerned about in their text and claim they are on top of those issues.

I am looking forward to giving it a try and digging into the code a bit.

As a web designer, if you install formmail scripts, you should log those installations and check at least quarterly to see if they have been updated. While this script claims no known vulnerabilities that have been exploited, of course there is someone out there as we speak trying to find one. Eventually if you don’t keep upgrading, changing, etc. they catch up to you so regular updates (this script was updated yesterday) are good.

Perl Python and PHP are all Open Source programming languages and there is a ton of free software written in all of those languages available online. Enterprises have until recently stuck with Java, C++, C or C# when it came to application development, but this is a trend that is apparently starting to change. InternetNews has a story about how Enterprise is starting to notice the benefits of using the “P languages” when it comes to fast application development. As a Perl/PHP coder myself, I can’t believe it took them this long to work that out. One interesting statistic that the article lists, is that PHP has proven considerably less secure then Perl or Python when based on the number of exploits found in programs written in each. I suspect that has more to do with newbie’s preferring to learn PHP than anything else, but the PHP developers would do well to introduce something like Perl’s Taint mode.

An interesting bit of PHP from my latest blog I am following, Mike Davidson. His blog has a neat feature, it is skinnable, and one of them has the live weather in Seattle. He took the weather from noaa and then massaged it with php. For a guy in big deal design, he sure had some time on his hands for that little project.

0PHP.com PHP Source Code Utility – Line Numberer and Syntax Highlighter is a demo of a great little on-line utility. You can also download a local copy.