MisterWebNet

The popular phpFox script has been around for a few years now and was really the first to corner the market in social community scripts.

Its a large script, covering much of what myspace, facebook and bebo have to offer. It offers:

• Videos - including uploads and if your server supports it compression to flv
• Blogs
• Gallery
• Forum
• Classifieds
• Groups
• Member profiles
• Event Calender
• Music Section

The one downfall with the Gallery section for us is the inability of users to have their own gallery section. Although a plugin does exist that allows you to do this, (I think there's a coppermine plugin also its added cost onto an already pricey script.

The forum is adequate if basic compared to say, vBulletin or myBB. phpFox are currently actively working on it so improvements are soon to come. phpFox version 2 is in active developent and beta downloads are available.

Whilst there's a standard template included, if you do want to run your own commuity site we advice that as this script has been used so much you get a designer to change the look and feel of the site. The source code is 100% available to edit and is nicely seperated out using the Smarty Templating Engine. If you have used Smarty before, you'll understand that that the HTML code is seperate to the PHP code allowing easy editing of the design.

However in phpFox, the coders have gone to great lengths to have their script object orientated - in many parts its 'over objectified'! There's classes for freaking everything! If you do a lot of work with phpFox, this is a good thing. If running a phpFox and understanding code is not your full time occupation, this is a bad thing. We feel that for most webmasters looking to make minor changes to the script, the complexity of the classes and the extreme object orientation of the script will be frustrating. You'll certainly need to learn smarty if you have never used it before if you want to do some design editing.

Another downfall with the script is the unavailability of plugins - free plugins. 90% of the plugins going are paid modifications, so expect to pay over and above for nearly everything. There's an active forum but don't expect an answer straight away. The good news is that there's always some helpful that will come along! There is a vBulletin Mod available (free) that is a big bonus.

The admin panel is basic but offers everything you need for the running of the site. In particular having all the phrases in one place and editable through the 'phrase manager' is a nice touch - like the vBulletin phrase manager.

There are debates about how the script would handle under heavy use, or a lot of users. We've seen sites using this up to about 50,000 users, after that we're not sure. But any script running intensive media applications including videos and mp3's will face problems in speed once enough members use it. We suspect a lot of the issues with the 'speed' question will ultimately have to do with the server setup and capabilities.

Home Website: http://www.phpfox.com/

Forum: http://forums.phpfox.com/

RATINGS

Setup: 8/10

Operation: 6/10

Value for money: 6/10

Overall: 66.66%

Conclusion:

phpFox is a well known script. Its a love hate relationship with webmasters, but a script of this size was never going to please anyone. Its expensive at $300 and lacks free plugins and modifications, but compared to SocialEngine works out cheaper when all the included sections are taken into account. An above average script thats good on the php side, but is badly let down by the lack of free templates.