Portal Software for phpBB

[LVZ]

We're going to be expanding our Southwest Las Vegas Neighborhood message board to other Las Vegas neighborhoods. To organize things and add a few new features I want to add a fairly simple portal that integrates well with phpBB.

I know that the phpBB development folks are working on their own but who knows when it will be finished.

These are two that I am considering:

(1) MX-Portal http://mx-system.com/
(2) ezPortal http://smartor.is-root.com/viewtopic.php?t=1860

Does anyone have experience with these?

[Vin DSL]

MX-Portal is pretty nice! I've never heard of ezPortal...

[lokki]

I installed ezPortal. Went in pretty nice, and has some cool plugins, but not extremely robust. It is flexible, if you can get into the PHP and templates.

I'm considering doing another one with MX.

[LVZ]

Originally posted by lokki
not extremely robust

Not efficient or tends to break?

http://www.phpbbhacks.com/viewhack.php?id=694
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/viewhack.php?id=1329

On the PhpBBhacks web site, MX got rated 4.98 and ezPortal got rated 8.19 However, since MX has been around a lot longer I wonder if the ratings don't reflect earlier (and presumably worse) versions of MX.

Any other feedback out there?

[lokki]

In this case, I'm using 'robust' to mean that it's kind of a bare-bones system. There aren't a lot of options for configuration, though the code is clean enough that you can roll your own solution, if you are so inclined. It doesn't seem that there are many updates, and the only one making plugins of any use seems to be Smartor himself. However, that can be a *good* thing!

I haven't had a problem with it breaking, but I did have to learn a bit about it's structure to understand where I was making mistakes.

Most operations are done with fairly few queries, but I haven't stressed my little forum at all... and I'm running it on a LAN... and it's only one of two web-enabled directories on it's server.

Sorry I'm not much more help.

I will say I've been happy, but it was the first I've tried - I wanted to check out MX just to see if it suited my needs a bit better.

[LVZ]

I think I'll try MX instead of ezPortal mainly because its files are located outside the forum directory and so it doesn't require altering/overwriting any phpBB code.

I like the clean looks of this MX site:

http://www.lotf.ca/portal/index.php

[DLMunson]

well i used smartor's ezportal and i loved it, easy to use, even easier to modify. never tried MX so cant comment on that but, you cant go wrong with ezportal

[LVZ]

After looking at the comparative code sizes, a few 10k for ezPortal versus a few 100k for MX, I reconsidered and decided to give ezPortal a try first for our phpBB message board site.

I think it will do fine for my needs. I'm still hacking around the edges on it but the basics seem solid.

http://my-las-vegas-neighborhood.com

Unlike MX, ezPortal doesn't touch the mySQL database although it does add/alter a few files in your forum directory. Even so, changes are relatively easy to make. The biggest problem so far is getting Firefox to work with it properly in 800x600 mode.