Opinion on custom forum software?

What's your opinion on this? Personally, I thought it's just reinventing the wheel to be honest, and most I've seen just look horrible (or at least plain boring and featureless) compared to any preexisting forum software.

 

I was about to say 'reinventing the wheel' as soon as I saw this thread. Glad you already wrote it for me

If you are really that keen on something original, then taking an existing software and simply fork it.

 

I agree that unless you're really good, then it probably isn't worth it. A hobbyist coder's result probably wouldn't be that great.

However, if Kier, for example, were to create a whole new script, I wouldn't have second thoughts about checking it out.

 

The amount of time it would take would far far outweigh any benefits for one person (or probably even a small group?) to do such a thing.

With tons of Open Source projects already available to use as a foundation, I just pretty much laugh at the people who say they're building their own.

Its always about 1-2 years later and you ask "How'd that go" and its always "about finished"

 

i dont think i could do it, you would have to be really good at that sort of thing to make it successful

 

There's this one guy who's already built a script. It's actually really good.

 

In my case it took me about 7 months or so. I don't think it's a good idea to laugh it off as a redundant alternative, since the really good ones custom-coded can very well have features not yet implemented by others (used to be highly unlikely in the past, but it's still worth a shot in the dark now that most solutions are open-source and available).

Also hi, new poster here. =)

 

Costly... That is my opinion. Whenever you need to make something custom it costs money. How much depends on the quality and the feature set. This includes people that code it themselves instead of coding for others and making invoices.

 

What about spending as much time as possible tailoring everything to your tastes (or to match something else)? While my custom solution doesn't yet meet 'market/industrial' standards (especially since I was still studying and testing the basics for it), I know for a fact 6-7 months are more than sufficient to produce a topnotch forum or CMS given enough experience.

It's really all about persistence than anything else.

If we're discussing costs, PHP and localhost testing are pretty much as costly as fresh air would be. The only real cost I can think of is time, as I stated before.

 

Time is the most expensive resource you have. It is the only resource that is truly finite and cannot be replenished.

While you were coding your forum, how many hours did you put into it? Now multiple that by $50 if you were doing work for someone else. So over six or seven months how much did it really cost?

 

I won't disagree with you regarding the value of time. However, I was simply stating that aside from that glaring flaw, there's no blatant reason to avoid coding something from scratch if you truly want to see it to perfection. Had I more experience before I began this project, I definitely would've been able to finish it in approximately half that time. I was still a student back then so there was no imposed deadline of any sort.

The forum was only a part of the entire CMS (granted, it was one of the larger sections there) but most of the time was spent more on testing and debugging than anything else.

I agree about the necessity of standard solutions available for others, but I think custom-coding has its merits too. If anything, think about the constantly updating spam algorithms coming out on a daily basis, and what exactly they target more.