The strange thing that caught my attention is that PunBB is a very simple PHP-powered bulletin board. Why such a big company like Facebook didn't make their own forum CMS or use a commercial one such as vBulletin, or the free and famous one phpBB, or bbPress. Why PunBB?

I went ahead to PunBB and register for an account for their forum. I tested it and here are some findings.

PunBB features

PunBB claims to have the following features:

• is fast.
• has simple layout and design.
• is easy to administrate and moderate.
• doesn't output huge, non-valid, (X)HTML pages.
• has source code you could read and understand.

What I like about PunBB

1. The forum seem to be pretty simple and fast as they claimed it to be.
2. It's light weight.
3. Active support community.
4. Used by famous companies like Facebook.
5. (due to unexpected reason, this part is missing).

What I don't like

There are something I don't like though.

1. The system redirect the URL for almost every action related to the database. That's something very strange, and ofcourse it slightly increase the lag and wait time between operations.
2. The PunBB forum, just like other forums and unlike bbPress, doesn't have friendly URL. At this time I still don't know if there are plugins that provide friendly URL feature for this. If not, this will be a major drawback for the system and might be the cause for me not using it.

What's next?

I'm considering this to be the solution for my own help forum in replacement for the help page. I hate complexity in the interface and back-end system. Something like Joomla just isn't right for me.

If you are interseted in this system, please go ahead and visit their website PunBB and test out their PunBB Forums. And of course, you should check out how face book use it on their Facebook Platform Developers Forum. And (another and) don't forget to come back here and tell me how you feel.