Unfortunately, it doesn't seem there's a lot of work being put into a new generation of PHP forums. VanillaForums looks interesting though.

About a year ago a friend and I tried to build a social network for some niche and forums were one of the functions. It is pure LAMP code, written in Yii framework. Since the project failed, I'm trying to get all the rights to publish the code under GPL. My plan is to also run a small social site for programmers as a proof of concept and having a real-world website where the code works. Of course, there are some things specific to our project which I need to remove/refactor first, but it is not too much work.

If anyone is interested in beta-testing when I release the first public version on github, please drop me an e-mail and I'll let you know when it's ready (my e-mail is in my profile).

Out of curiosity, why Yii?

A few years ago I tried different PHP frameworks. CakePHP seemed too strict with database schema, Zend seemed too complicated. I built large applications with CodeIgniter, it's ok but lacks features. Kohana docs and support did not promise much. Laravel did not exists back then. So I tried Yii (it was version 1.0.something) and it was great. Quick prototyping, powerful, but simple enough and good support on the forum. I built a lot of apps with Yii and this experience influenced the choice because I knew I wouldn't spend time learning the framework, but building the product instead.

Especially, since I built my last 3 projects using Node.js, it seemed that learning another PHP framework like Laravel would not benefit me too much. Now, you might ask why did I not go down the node.js route. It's because I wanted to build LAMP based code which I could eventually open source if the project fails. I plan for it to become a standard PHP package for social-network type of sites. You know, just like you have Wordpress for blogging, you could use my engine for small social networks, or just MVPs.

I call "my engine" since I haven't named it yet.

I had a similar experience not too long ago. I'm not overly fond of PHP and had already begun working on other aspects of the site in NodeJS.

My solution was to rely on Vanilla Forums for user management and authentication. They also have a pretty nice minimal theme designed for embedding in other applications.

I created a quick and dirty NodeJS plug-in for mimicking Vanilla's cookie hashing so that cookies could be read and validated from Node. It's worked out well.

What about SMF? It's very efficient, even though the code is messy, and easy to setup.

SMF is nice for users and usually OK for admins but the code is indeed a mess, and, for example, it stores usergroups as a comma-separated list in a VARCHAR(255), so it will break horribly if you have many membergroups.

Source: admin on a SMF2 forum.

This is a phenomenon the "better competition" should probably pay attention to, then.