SubDreamer?

Anyone have any experience with this and can tell me how easy it is to use, how powerful, and how versatile? How about maintenance? Is it low maintenance adding new content?

I'm thinking of moving Glimmer Games over to a CMS, and I've been looking at Joomla/Mambo. I like Joomla, but forum integration is limited and the only fully integrated forum is not mature enough for me.

SubDreamer doesn't have quite the same variety of theme and addons, but it's probably got enough for GG. So any thoughts and experiences to share with it?

Red October is a SubDreamer

LOL. Good one.

I use SubDreamer. It's great. Extremely easy to use. Its best feature is the community, very supportive.

Joomla/Mambo integrate well with the SMF forum from www.simplemachines.org - unless that is the forum you say is not mature enough?

Bugger, Slunkar beat me.

I use subdreamer. Not really pushed it though. Has been one of the simplest to set up. Integrates well with a couple of forum scripts too (I'm using simplemachines with it).

Overall I've been very happy with it.

Yep, Simple Machines is the one that isn't mature enough. That wasn't actually my opinion, I saw a message somewhere from the creator saying that it wasn't mature enough for serious use yet. But I may have misunderstood or missed the context.

Anyway, simple to set up is exactly what I'm looking for, so I've bought a license and we'll see how I go. I have the old site migrated temporarily, so I'm free to play.

SMF and SubDreamer integrate very well too. One login covers you for the website and the forum. Very slick.

SMF 1.06 is more than mature enough for general use. I find it nicer to use than phpBB.

http://www.stefanholmes.com/ for a bit of a demo of SubDreamer + SMF.

Well PowWeb do have an option to automatically set up SMF 1.06 in my webspace, so that is an option. If I decide to try them together, do I installed SMF or SubDreamer first, ideally?

I migrated to SMF from phpBB, after I had all sorts of problems with phpBB.. There was even a migration script which moved all the messages from phpBB.

As for install order, it doesn't really matter to much (I believe). Pretty much all you have to do is select the forum type from a pull down menu in subdreamer... job done ;)

Only real issue I've had is making sure the relevant menu selections are retained in forum mode, but thats probably my fault.

Not got into re-skinning it (other than using pre-defined skins), as my artistic skills are not that great. I've heard from other people that it's pretty easy though.

Thanks Graham.

I've found a nice existing skin which is pretty much perfect. All I'll have to do is edit a few of the included graphics and it should be just what I need.

Support has been excellent so far too. They were very quick and full of suggestions with the best way to have zero downtime while I installed SD and got the new site up.

Very impressed so far.

I've only ever installed SubDreamer and then SMF afterwards on blank sites. I don't know how you go about retaining user information if you install in a different order. You're best off visiting subdreamer.com forums to find that out.

It's eminently possible, I do know that much.

It is a blank site. I wasn't suggesting I would let people sign up before adding the forum. I just wanted to make sure it didn't matter which was physically installed first.