Private website/forum project

Interesting question of the day...

Hi, I'm lead developer of PHPFusion, and I will try my best to explain it to you before I start my day with the coding.

Security:
Like all open source CMS, if we were open to SQL injection and exploits, we patch it. Simple.
If you want to host a forum, my only idea is to get stopforumspam plugin because the bots, and it is about that everywhere.
If your site is on private community, and is not simply registrable by anybody. Then any CMS is safe.

Ok, now to the general question of whether what kind of CMS you want. Is PHPFusion, or any kind right for you?

Generally speaking, if you follow the CMS market for a substantial period, you will know that there are only 2 types of CMS out there. The breakdown is:

1. Function specific CMS.

These kind of CMS is built at core for just doing a specific task.

Wordpress for Blog, MediaWiki for Wiki, Gallery for Album, so forth, IPB, Vbulletin, phpBB for Forum, so forth.

If you just need a blog for example, the best is to get Wordpress, because they niche in it, and development is swift, and focused. You do not need to think twice about it. The advantage of these kind of CMS is because their patches and development roadmap is targetted and focused to increase performance, productivity.. into what they do. (Wordpress has also Buddy Press. Look into that if you want a social based one. It's kinda cool off project.)

But yes, these are simply going to be catered for end users, and you will find % of sites that niches it, or people who doesn't really code much will use these.

2. Full stack CMS.

These kind of CMS is built to cater all rounder features - sampling with forum, blog, news, articles, wiki, shop, etc. They are samples of what the core can do. It is not a professional-end-grade solution like the what the function specific ones can deliver, ever.

In a general sense, a full stack CMS just provide little of everything.

In this category, the best you can find on the internet that my self preference for open source recommended would be one of the three - PHPFusion, Joomla, and finally Drupal.

A full stack CMS is attractive to many people with coding knowledge because it is an all rounder, with everything and from there the developer can custom modify and save hundreds or even thousands of hours developing the intended end product.

In terms of core codes, a full stack CMS will have 100x more tools than a focused one because at core, it supplies methods/functions/api that allows you to expand the CMS. That is where a full stack CMS like PHPFusion should focus ----- MODS.

It's up to you of what you want, but if you want a only "FORUM" , go for specific CMS like phpbb or Vbulletin.

However, if suddenly you want it to have news, run social network, run a IRC chat ... then you best go for a full stack CMS to avoid yourself from tons of support questions on how to do this and that. They won't entertain you much :)

PHPFusion 9 is not about news, articles, forum, blog, etc. They are not and never will be up to the pro-niched-specific CMS ones, nor we are trying or will ever try to compete with them in terms of functionalities. We will waste our hours and manpower doing that.

We build PHPFusion 9 to be the best professional modding platform that allows developers to expand the core base further than any specific CMS can ever do. That is developer oriented, yes. Our aim is to become the best choice for a developer to have their site to be developed on whatever they want.

- An accounting system, a Gaming system, a Radio station, an online gateway, a social network, a corporation web, a government site, that branches out to PERL and Ruby, Node.js etc.

The possibilities are endless for developers with a full stack ones, and it is the most expensive kind of development on web.

Major social network, runs on a full stack CMS environment, with its foundation "toolkits".

Toolkits are the most expensive development you will ever encounter, if you look for it.
One most common toolkit is TinyMCE. If it is not open source, it will be very expensive.

The not so common toolkit is Kendo UI. It sells at a good price ^^
How about a form and page building framework? Visual Composer for Wordpress..an external 3rd party... vs. Page Composer for PHPFusion 9 as an internal core developed.

Similarly, PHPFusion 9 has Fusion Dynamics. And it works with Fusion Defender. It could fetch probably much higher if we were to put a valuation to it, but we are not interested to be enterprising on codes.

Toolkits are the most expensive kind of applications out there for sure, and only a full stack CMS will be able to offer that to you.

The downside is, if you go for a full stack CMS, you will need to develop for more features. But if you go for a niche ones, you can stop looking and get it but don't expect for modding, because it's very terrible once you want options. (That's why we have Addon archive and support forum.)

Have a look into PHPFusion 9, and see if you like what you see. Certainly, we can have roadmaps to follow the trending features in our core infusions, but don't expect much. We're not even close to implementing Node.js on forum. If you want Node JS based forum, (the latest), go for NodeBB or something.

That's it for my input. I hope you can get what you want.

Thank you for the comprehensive answer. I think a few forums and function specific CMS might be customizable enough for my needs but PHPFusion can definitely do it with little tweaking. I was interested to hear what others think and i will post about the specific problems i need help with. I only tried v7.02 because it had so many infusions with it but i will definitely be looking into v9 more. Im not experienced enough to talk about security so maybe i went overboard with my statement.

Thank you very much for such a great project.

Edit: 16/3: I looked into it VPS should be good enough and for higher traffic transition to dedicated... I should be able to get nginx and qwebirc installed on some Linux OS VPS. I hope v9 will succesfully release!