miniBB
miniBB stands for “mini bulletin board”, a fast and lightweight PHP-powered flat-type free open source discussion board software. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are being user-friendly, fast and not overwhelmed by a large number rarely used features as compared to other discussion board software.
miniBB can be used on all operating systems that are able to support the PHP scripting language. Current release of miniBB supports MySQL database as the default data storage.
History
miniBB project was created by Paul Puzyrev and Sergei Larionov. Both programmers are from Riga, Latvia.
Both Sergei and Paul were willing to start their own project on PHP. Paul needed a simple customizable forum system, so he involved Sergei in the miniBB project, which turned into the mature bulletin board software with its own pecularities, making it different from many other free open source boards.
First released on February 19, 2002, miniBB is now running on tens of thousands of communities all over the world wide web. Some of the worlds biggest discussion boards with over a million posts are using miniBB.
miniBB differed from its competitors by the reduced size, options, optimized programming code and oversimplified interface. This software displays the simplicity associated with minimalism, being like “art-of-programming”, conceptual software. This software is proposed to be installed and used by those who like minimalism, simplicity of style, with achievement by using a few very simple elements to maximum effect. It could be downloaded and installed by anybody with the minimum technical knowledge as well.
On September 25 2007, miniBB became a registered trademark in United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Versions history
Features Comparison between versions 1.x and 2.x
Accordingly to the Updates history provided on the project’s website, miniBB 1 series followed just basic principles of the common bulletin board software. It included the possibility to build a very basic version of a virtual forum. Instead, miniBB 2 series followed the tactics of development of “embedded” software, which could be integrated / united with pre-existing membership and the graphical layout of the website. It also provided the way to extend user’s profiles with unlimited new fields and custom functions, and introduced the principle of add-ons architecture. That forced miniBB authors and 3rd party programmers to develop a lot of additional extensions coming independently from the program’s core. Beginning with the version 2.4 miniBB also was extended to have custom URLs which also could be keywords-based, like it’s proposed by the modern tactics of Search Engine Optimization.