I've been seriously thinking about coding a php forum from scratch. Okay, I know that conventional wisdom is "why reinvent the wheel?" However, I think my reasons for wanting to do so are different, but I'm far from an expert. So, I'd really like to hear opinions on whether you think creating one from scratch is better or finding a pre-made one to suit my needs.
I'm coding a user-submittable image gallery, as well as a blogging system. This needs to be tied into our forum and use the same sessions and usernames. I don't want two or three logins for all the different features. Right now we're using phpBB, and I know that it's possible to tie it into that, but it's extremely clunky. Not to mention, there are a lot of things about phpbb that I don't like. I hate the way phpBB's attachment mod works, and I want to do the read states differently. Besides that, I've had to hack the HECK out of my phpBB just to get the features I want. It makes upgrading the forum every few months a royal pain. And I'm sort of worried that one of those upgrades will render the other sections of my site inoperable if they were tied into it. With my own custom forum, I wouldn't have to worry about that.
But mainly, I just want to do my own forum so that I can more easily integrate it with the other parts of the site. I don't like the idea of having to rely on someone else's scripts for those major sections of my site to work.
So, what do you think? Is this a case where doing your own forum is advisable? Or should I find a forum that suits my needs (which isn't phpBB, unfortunately) and hack it all to heck?
