Simple Machines Forum

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Simple Machines Forum
Simple Machines Community Forum running SMF Development Edition
Maintainer:	The SMF Team
Stable release:	1.1.2 (10 February, 2007) _[+/-]
Preview release:	No preview releases (2 December, 2006) _[+/-]
Use:	Forum software
License:	Simple Machines License
Website:	Simple Machines

Simple Machines Forum (abbreviated as SMF) is a freeware Internet forum script. The script is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database backend, although multi-database support is being developed for the next major release^[1]. It is being developed by the Simple Machines development team.

1 History
2 Localization
3 Modifications
4 Support
5 The SMF team
6 Charter Members
7 References
- 7.1 Footnotes
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] History

SMF was created to replace the forum software YaBB SE, which at the time was gaining a bad reputation because of problems with its Perl based equivalent and similarly named software YaBB.

YaBB was known to cause resource allocation problems and was resource heavy on many systems, in its earlier versions. YaBB SE was written as a rough PHP port of YaBB, but tended to have many of the same resource and even security problems.

SMF started as a small project by [Unknown] (one of the YaBB SE developers) and its main intent was to add more advanced templating to YaBB SE. The project then slowly grew to address common feature requests, efficiency problems, and security concerns. A rehaul of YaBB SE had been in development for several years, but was superseded by this then competing project. Popular interest in the new YaBB SE fork sparked a complete rewrite of the code, with security and performance in mind. This eventually became today's Simple Machines Forum.^[2]^[3]

On the 23rd of October 2006, Simple Machines LLC was registered in the state of Arizona, and the transfer of copyrights from Lewis Media to Simple Machines LLC was completed on the 24th of November 2006 during a three-day retreat in Tucson, AZ. This was done for the "[solidification of] the team’s commitment to continuously providing free software, without the perceived risks of corporate influence"^[4]

[edit] Localization

SMF is available in over 21 languages, including Albanian, Arabic, Swedish, Catalan, Persian, Chinese, Finnish, Greek, Japanese, Turkish, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Hebrew, Bulgarian, Italian, Thai, Polish, Russian, Norwegian, and Romanian. It can be translated to other languages by volunteers. UTF-8 and non-UTF-8 encodings are available for all.

[edit] Modifications

A theme created for Halloween

SMF has a modification base repository for free modification hosting and tracking via the Simple Machines main site. Many modifications, or "mods" as they are usually called, have been created and distributed free of charge, including an arcade, profile additions, message approval, gallery, RPG system^[5], spam filter, various SEO features, and many more.

The package manager included in SMF is one of the flagship features. It allows an administrator to install modifications and updates to SMF without having to modify the code of the script, usually with only a few mouse clicks.

[edit] Support

The SMF support staff and users provide free support on the official community forums. Their duties include helping forum owners with troubleshooting and optimization.

[edit] The SMF team

As well as the support division the Simple Machines team also includes graphics, documentation, modification/SDK, localization, and management divisions.

[edit] Charter Members

People who wish to support Simple Machines for a yearly fee are rewarded with a Charter Member only section on the forum, advanced beta versions to test before they go public. Advanced support for SMF including installation and upgrades by the staff are also provided.