Let's start this board off with a post on why SMF was picked to run this forum on. Not really about CMS, I know - but there were CMS issues here.

I had three choices: (1) use a forum plugin for the CMS this site is run on; (2) use a bridge for a well-known application like SMF (SimpleMachinesForum) or vBulletin; or (3) simply co-install SMF in the same webspace.

Using (1) would give the best SEO result, plus the smoothest working and management - you could have native CMS URL and metadata control plus a unified membership list. However, members of the forum would be site members as well (though with low privileges). There are a couple of really good forum plugins for this CMS, as well - so it would be a tough decision to go with any other solution.

Going route (2), bridging an app with the CMS, gives a half-and-half solution. In theory a bridge uses the common membership database, and other things like some metadata functionality may be shared. It's used if you don't like any of the native forum plugins, or have some special attachment to an app there is a bridge for.

Option (3), co-installing, gives the least commonality and duplicates a lot of work. It also requires another database, unless you want to share one with something else by using a table prefix like smf_ for instance. But - it has the major benefit that the CMS and the forum are separate, and a problem with one won't affect the other.

In the end I decided to go with (3), a separate co-install, because it keeps the two apps apart. We get plenty of bot probes and hack attempts on this site for various reasons; the bots know what CMS we use, and look for non-upgraded extensions and exploits all the time.

So, anyway, I picked SMF as the best option in the circumstances. It has to be said that SEO on SMF is lousy - not really any other way to put it. Compared to most of the big-name CMS they just haven't seen the light yet - all the metadata site-wide is boilerplate, for example. You can get a really basic plugin (or 'mod' as they call it) to partially fix that, but it's only a part-fix. All it does (it's a 3KB module in any case so what do you expect) is to change out SMF's default boilerplate meta for yours...

So: the page title changes for each page - it's the post title, as usual - but the meta desc and keywords stay the same sitewide, whatever you set as the default. Very basic but there you go. Of course, using a CMS plugin, if you have a real metadata solution, it allows you to set custom metadata per page - but that seemed like overkill for a forum. It would be nice to be able to set the meta up correctly for each separate board, though.

URLs: don't ask. Well, that's because I don't know - the plugins look extremely basic, and until there are some posts on the boards here we just won't really know what the URLs look like. Oh well. One good thing though - they work without an htaccess. That's always a plus because, when you think about it, it's the right way. Why should the server have to rewrite the URLs? It's the job of the application to generate the correct URIs.

It's kind of strange - as an SEO guy - to take the worst of the three options in that area, but I just didn't like the alternatives. I wanted the forum and its membership on a separate database, and that was the only way to do it.

Just have to hope that SMF get their act together at some stage and haul themselves kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. It's all about the SEO now, because that's where the revenues start from. Elsewhere the devs seem to have picked up on the fact that fancy features aren't much use if there's no traffic; just have to hope the SMF people catch up soon.

Oh, and there is a nice skin (sorry theme) to go on here once I've hacked it around a bit. The default one's a bit basic but time is short at the moment.

And there goes another one of my famous 'short' treatments of a subject...