Nothing to do with *this* site, just a general question, but given that people who post regularly on forums often know a lot about them, I thought this might be a good place to ask for opinions.

I am part of a community of over 1000 members that's likely to grow to about 6000 this year.

We're currently using IP Board, but we have a lot of members that aren't that familiar with posting on forums and the current one doesn't seem to be helping them acclimatise.

We need multiple forums, a few subforums and many different groups/labels for members (ideally people can belong to multiple groups, depending on their role/s within the project).

The ability to embed pictures, video and even potentially sound, as well as PDF type attachments would be ideal (although I think most forum s/w does at least most of this now).

I'd love the whole project site to migrate to a CMS - most likely Joomla - soon, but timing on that is sketchy. Something that integrates with Joomla would be perfect, even something that was exclusive to Joomla would be workable.

Ease-of-use is one of the biggest factors though, given how many members are not IT savvy.

Does anyone here have a favourite forum software package that they could recommend?

Or, perhaps put another way, if you were needing to manage a 6000-strong member site dedicated to completing a 2 year project (with a very low IT budget), what online resources/software would you consider using?

http://www.vbulletin.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBulletin

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/180179-Joomla-Integration

I am by no means a tech person, but as far as I know one of the main purposes and uses of the open source Drupal CMS is for forums and discussion groups. And despite having no IT background, I could manage it and create content after just a few tutorials I read online - so, easy to use imo. And btw, it's free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

Thanks so much for the suggestions and links!

vbulletin is certainly extremely popular. Sometimes there are hidden gems that people know about that just aren't as widely known, but otherwise, this is probably the way to go.

Interesting about Drupal, as from what I'd heard about it, it is favoured by developers because it is completely modifiable, but the trade-off is that it's more difficult to use (or, more specifically) maintain. I guess it depends on what you want to do with it. I hadn't heard that forums and discussion groups were one of its main purposes. I'll keep it in mind - I think it's really the only other CMS I'd consider.

Joomla!

(stay away from 1.6 for the moment, it's only just out, it's still a little bit buggy and most extensions haven't been upgraded for 1.6 compatibility, so go for the 1.5 version instead)

with the Kunena Forums extension

All free, easy to set up and use.

I would say that unless you're a serious developer then Joomla will be more up your street than Drupal - not that Drupal isn't good, it just requires more tech savvy than Joomla.

Having said that I'm biased towards Joomla! anyway, one of the reason for that bias is the availability of well-written extensions like the Kunena Forums one, which is not only free, but it's so easy to use - completely intuitive, and has every requirement you can think of that a forums component might need.

Great, thanks AsylumUtopia, Kunena definitely sounds like something I need investigate.

I've done some work with Joomla, which is why I was leaning towards it, but these responses have given me some excellent recommendations, so I will check them all out.

Many thanks!

Well now that we have a few other options to compare and choose from, I guess that may well be the case that Drupal is the most difficult one to learn to use. What I omitted to say... is that I'm currently completing a degree at MIT (although in a non-high tech field), and it's my fellow students, teachers and MIT's tech support staff who advised me to use Drupal when I started my own project. (It's also them by the way who said it was often used for online discussion groups and that the architecture lends itself well to creating forums and sub-groups). So I guess for these MIT Tech savvy folks, Drupal is a piece of cake!

Anyway, best of luck with your final selection and project!