Off the shelf Php User Forum

Question

I have a pre-existing user database on my site.
Now, I want to install a PHP-Based Forum on my site
which works with already existing user table.

Also, I would like it to be as lightweight
as possible -- in terms of features as well as
bandwidth consumption

Please suggest some..

Thanks.

Answer 1

MyBB is great, free and lightweight. It should be easy to modify your users table to add it to MyBB's. I strongly recommend! Its feature packed and free unlike most of the others!

Answer 2

MyBB is fantastic, but I wanted something much simpler.
Here is what I could find :
http://johnsadventures.com/software/discussionforum/

It is very similar to "Joel on software" kind of forums.

Answer 3

Phorum is good for integrating into existing sites - I've just done it with an existing Symfony application. Phorum has a number of hooks available that you can write functions to be called for. This allows you to override any number of things from user authentication (your example) to posting replies, session creation etc.

In this way you can use your existing user table to handle the authentication, and not use Phorum's user table. More details on hooks here.

I wouldn't class it as massively lightweight, but it is extremely fast and easy to extend.