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This article is about the differences between phpwind and discuz. The editor thinks it is very practical, so share it with you as a reference and follow the editor to have a look.

Discuz! (referred to as dz) and phpwind (referred to as pw) are the two most famous PHP forum systems in China. With their announcement of open source one after another, great progress has been made in all aspects, no matter in technology, in function, or in interface. It is far from comparable to those simple electronic bulletin board systems abroad. One of the side effects is that it has greatly promoted the popularity of PHP in China (it was only when I was looking for a suitable forum program that I began to pay attention to PHP, and then couldn't extricate myself).

Objectively speaking, the current pw and dz have their own strengths and weaknesses, and the fierce competition between them should be said to improve the level of the PHP forum. In terms of function, they not only catch up with the mobile network forum, which is famous for its many functions and loopholes, but also because their efficiency and speed far exceed the mobile network, so that the mobile network market has greatly shrunk. Some of the original mobile network forums have been converted into dz or pw, and the mobile network has to start working on the PHP forum.

It is difficult to say which one of them is better. After all, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and I dare not jump to conclusions here. However, from the perspective of market share and online comments, dz still has the upper hand, and last year several well-known forums in China were converted into dz (such as Phoenix New Media, Mowen, tompda, etc.), while pw gained little in terms of large websites.

But after all, for many beginners, they all have to face the question of choosing forum programs, so which is better, dz or pw, has become a frequently asked question, this kind of unanswered questions will naturally be asked repeatedly. This paper attempts to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the two forums from a deeper level in order to provide a reference for beginners to choose. If there is anything wrong, you are welcome to criticize and correct it.

I. Interface

First of all, from the interface, on the whole, the interface of dz is more beautiful, the overall feeling is good.

The interface of pw gives the impression of imitating dz. At the same time, in terms of interface details, pw still doesn't look as perfect as dz.

II. Technical section

Technically speaking, both pw and dz use file data caching technology, by setting common data tables, such as forum layout parameters, basic parameters, etc., to generate static cache files (according to conditions to trigger updates or manual updates), to reduce the number of database reads and improve efficiency, in this respect they are very similar.

1. Template technology

From the template technology, dz from the 2.5F version began to use this static template technology, from my personal point of view, is very suitable for forums such frequently updated website programs to use. It solves the problem of template parsing efficiency by dynamically generating static templates.

At the same time, the template mode of dz makes it easy and intuitive to modify the interface.

The way pw uses the echo statement (let's call it a template) is much shabby, and it takes a long time to add an if judgment condition. Templates with mixed PHP code are also easily deleted by misoperation in dreamweaver. In particular, if you modify slightly carelessly, it is likely to make the web page a whiteboard (no output), so that every time I modify the pw template, it is like treading on thin ice. I'm afraid this is the reason why there are far more dz than pw in the third-party template.

However, pw is also improving on the template. Now verycms 3.0 has begun to use the real template technology, but the current use is still relatively elementary.

2. Speed problem

From the template point of view, the efficiency of the two should be about the same, pw template is actually a direct mix of PHP statements part of the PHP file, and dz template usually does not need to parse, so the efficiency should be about the same, but there are always people on the Internet claim that the site uses dz slower than pw, in this respect I have not tested, do not dare to comment. And the website access speed is still affected by many factors, such as: local network speed, server bandwidth, psychology. Objective evaluation is still very difficult unless professional and technical means are used. However, judging from the speed of the official website, pw is obviously dominant, hehe.

Recently looked at the CSS file of dz, it is obvious that CSS is used a little too much, in dz a lot of CSS,CSS files are used as high as 16KB (pw is only about 2KB), which may result in low efficiency when IE renders web pages. At the same time, because the CSS file of dz is too large, we have to use the external way (Link).

In this way, if the network speed is very slow, the web page has been or partially downloaded, and the CSS file download is not completed (this often happens when the network speed is slow), then the web page will not display properly at all.

When the network speed is slow, the CSS file of dz alone will take several seconds, or even more than ten seconds to download, and the whole web page can only be displayed correctly after the CSS download is completed, it is no wonder that when the network speed is slow, the performance of dz is much lower than that of pw.

On the contrary, pw is obviously more concise when designing CSS, which is certainly beneficial to the rendering of web pages. At the same time, pw uses the way to embed the CSS file, although each visit to the web page caused a few K bytes of traffic, but the actual impact is not great, but feel that the web page opens faster than dz (this is a typical case where pw uses a stupid method, but often works better than dz).

In this regard, it is recommended that dz make up its mind to simplify overly bloated CSS files and improve the speed of web pages.

III. Function chapter

Below, I would like to make a simple analysis of the functions of dz5.5 and pw5.3, which I think is more in-depth, but may still be too shallow for the expert. Please correct me:

1. Login method:

Pw's foreground login and background login use different Cookie methods, so the separation of the front and background, personal feeling, is conducive to security, but also easy to manage. The background account and the front desk account can be completely separated.

On the other hand, the front and background login of dz uses an account, although it prompts for a password again when entering the background, but it is not as convenient as pw.

In particular, dz requires input prompt questions (optional) when registering, and there is also a prompt input interface in the login interface, which makes you feel absolutely superfluous and boring. If you use prompt questions to retrieve your password, it makes some sense. In the way of prompting questions, the novice was at a loss as to what to do, and his head was dizzy.

2. Column display:

Pw has supported left and right column display since 5.0.1, but the function is too simple to display subsections in a tree shape. This function is not so much as no, it is a bit funny and belongs to a semi-finished product (it is also in line with the consistent characteristics of pw-like to introduce some imperfect things for everyone to modify).

Looked at the dz5.5 column shows that the work is still relatively perfect, feeling quite good.

3. Efficiency of background management:

The horizontal operation of pw is very good, which greatly saves the difficulty of management, especially when setting permissions according to user groups, which is very convenient. Dz needs to be improved in this aspect.

Dz provides a solution to solve the problem of repeated operations in the background, which makes some sense, but it is not easy to use, and it is more cumbersome to set up a separate project.

4. Personal space (anthology) function:

Dz5.5 has built-in minispace personal space function, which can be said that since discuz merged supsite, it has occupied a great advantage in the outreach of forum functions and attracted the attention of many personal websites.

The minispace, in the official words of the dz, goes like this:

"make full use of the original resources of the forum, members do not have to pay more, they can have a perfect combination of personality display page and X-Space, and can smoothly realize the natural transition between MiniSpace and X-Space."

After a general look, I found that this minispace is doing very well. Using it, users can sort out their excellent posts and form a collection of articles to facilitate others to visit. I have seen this function in other forums before, and I thought it was very good. I didn't expect dz to integrate it. This feature can already meet the functional requirements of most forums, and if the requirements are higher, such as allowing users to post b0 posts, according to the official statement, you can also migrate to X-space. But more importantly, minispace is open source, while the source code of X-space is not open.

Speaking of X-space, we feel that although pw is functionally enough to compete with dz, it lags far behind dz in the extension of the forum. X-space can achieve the forum-centric personal space function, while pwblog (has been renamed to Lxblog, the official version has not been launched, this article only takes version 5.1.5 as an example) is divorced from the forum, although the post push function has been available since 4.3.2, but it has not been easy to use. After 4.x push, the pictures and attachments are not normal, 5.1.5 although it can be pushed normally, but the updated posts in the forum In B0 customers, there are no more replies, so it can be said that the push function is just a useless embellishment in pwblog.

In the final analysis, what we often want is a forum post collection function. Pwblog repeatedly pushes the contents of the forum to b0 visitors, which is both a waste of space and meaningless. Dz is far better than pw in this respect, which is commendable. But the function of minispace is a little simple, for example, there is no classification function of articles collection posts, no home page recommendation posts, and so on (maybe the classification significance of forum posts is not great, but it is better than none, right? )

5. Anti-irrigation technology

Pw5.3 finally accepted my proposal of using CAPTCHA for novice registrations before posting, which not only does not affect the use of old users, but also restricts malicious irrigation robots by CAPTCHA. Dz does not provide this feature, but it has the ability to set the Nth post without custom Q & A (dz's CAPTCHA is so bad that it can't be seen at all, and it seems better to use a custom Q & A).

In terms of preventing automatic registration, both pw and dz use a custom question and answer method to prevent automatic registration. The specific principle is very simple, and the implementation of both is similar. The difference is that dz requires more than 10 questions to take effect, while pw can only set one question. In addition, another difference is that pw can customize the form variable name used internally in Q & A, which may be more effective in preventing malicious autoregistration. Pw's customization questions can only be used for registration, while dz's can be used for registration, posting and SMS.

From the current specific application, with a problem basically solved the problem of automatic registration (the result of a long time of practice), of course, do not rule out the possibility of super-large websites, with a problem easy to be broken, dz may be more effective. It is just that the dz restriction requires more than 10 to take effect, which is inexplicable.

6. Front desk management function

Pw has the function of sub-moderator, but unlike the general idea, the sub-moderator is appointed by the moderator, which may lead to confusion of permissions, so few people use this function.

Among the management functions of the foreground, pw is more convenient, not only in the topic list, but also in the post content page, which is more intuitive than the drop-down mode of dz. And delete posts in a topic, pw is much more intuitive than dz.

Inexplicably, mobile posts in the pw5.3 version will be preceded by a mobile prompt "this post has been moved by xxxx from xxxx to this area (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dz realizes the function of "sticking", which can sink those useless rubbish stickers that are occasionally turned up, which is really much more convenient. Once I had to post N posts in advance in order to sink a post in pw. And dz moderator management function, highlight, essence and other operations can be done in one go, much more convenient than pw.

7. WYSIWYG editor

Dz5.5 and pw5.3 began to replace the WYSIWYG editor with a ubbcode editor (the two forums have different names, here with a more popular name, temporarily called UBBCode), instead of the original HTML visual editor.

Speaking of, this ubbcode visual editor does solve the previous code approach, unable to visualize, resulting in many non-IT people can not control the format of posts; and mobile network like the use of HTML, but also resulting in a large number of redundant code and security risks.

However, the consequence is that when reposting, it can be transferred directly from other people's web pages, with pictures and text, but it is very convenient, although it is suspected of stealing links. With this kind of editor, it can no longer be so convenient, so after changing the editor, there are a lot of complaints in the official forum. And the new editor also has a lot of small BUG, which has caused widespread dissatisfaction. (note: after using a section of DZ, it seems that the WYSIWYG editor of dz 5.3 seems to have many problems and is almost impossible to use, which may not be as easy to use as the pw editor.)

8. Attachment upload and WYSIWYG functions:

Attachments to pw can only be mixed and typeset after posts are submitted for upload. Dz is much better in this respect. It is much more convenient to mix and arrange before uploading.

Dz still displays too much information on the attachments of images that are not involved in the upload, which affects the appearance (it seems to be influenced by vbb and phpbb). Pw only displays the word "picture" and description information, but what is even more disgusting is that it puts these pictures on top of the text.

9. Analysis of attachment hotlink protection technology:

Dz uses the method of hiding the image address and detecting the access source (optional) to protect against hotlink. It should be said that the server has a heavy burden and the effect is OK, but it can not completely solve the problem.

The method used by pw is simpler, but more effective: it is to change the name of the attachment directory regularly or automatically, which should be said to be a good way to achieve quick results with less investment, and it is also technically simple. However, the latest version of pw5.3 also introduces the way to hide the attachment address, and the background does not seem to be able to turn off this function, which seems to be a little superfluous.

Found that dz can also manually modify the attachment directory in the background, can also play a certain effect, but there is no automatic modification function.

10. Advertising function:

Dz is better than pw, and the advertising function is more perfect. For example, in-post ads, the position below the post is similar to the position of mobile network, which looks more tidy, while the position of pw makes the layout of the post look messy and not good-looking. Dz's post-room ads can be inserted into large Google Banner ads, or other picture forms of ads, the display effect is very good.

Compared with dz,pw ads, the insertion position is less and the effect is worse.

11. The avatar shows:

Dz can not limit the length and width of the uploaded avatar, but can only limit the total number of pixels, which is not flexible enough and is not as convenient as pw. And beyond a certain size of the avatar, is automatically scaled and stretched, looks very ugly. And dz also automatically added a frame to the avatar, which is disgusting. It can be seen that dz complicates simple things, but as long as it is the same as pw, there is no need for stretching at all.

12. Size limits of accessories:

Pw can only set the size of all attachments, while dz can set the upload size for individual format attachments, which is more flexible, especially suitable for some flash sites or technical sites (such as uploading large-size drawings, etc.).

13. Word filtering:

Pw can only be filtered in a normal way and does not support uppercase and lowercase (it's a simple thing, but it's official, it's easy to do it).

And dz can not only recognize case, but also has a certain fuzzy recognition function, which is quite good. Of course, it would be even better to directly support regular expressions.

14. Custom code features:

Pw does not support custom wincode code so far, which is relatively rigid. To add functionality, you can only modify the js file, which is too troublesome.

Dz is perfect in this respect. It is easy to add or decrease the code and modify the size of the playback interface. Just set it in the background.

15. Recycle Bin function:

Dz can set automatic cleanup, but pw cannot

16. IP source display function:

Dz's IP address and source display is similar to mobile, which looks inconvenient and requires clicking on the small computer icon. Or the source of pw's IP address looks more comfortable.

17. Defend against CC attacks:

Pw added anti-CC attacks as early as 4.3.2, and it is easy to set up and can be understood by beginners. It was for this reason that I used pw in the first place.

Although dz5.5 claims to have protection against cc attacks, it seems difficult to understand. It can't be found after looking for it in the background for a long time. It is estimated that the novice can not operate it. At that time, a famous webmaster forum (with dz) could not be opened for a long time by CC attacks, so it seems that the anti-CC attack function of dz still needs to be improved.

18. Backup function

Pw can support the backup of data tables outside the pw program, and the judgment criterion is not based on the table prefix. Data tables other than pw tables can be backed up separately. For plug-ins that have created new tables, backing up data is super easy, which is more user-friendly.

Dz only backs up according to the table prefix. For example, if you set a table called cdb_test, it will backup it as a forum data table. But if you set up a table called test, you can find your own way to go.

But what is stronger about dz than pw is that backups can be compressed. Downloading and transferring backup files after compression should save a lot of space and time, which should be very useful for very large forums. Dz backups can specify a file name, and the backup data is represented in hexadecimal (safer, but takes up more space), so it is estimated that the Chinese internal code problem of import and recovery will not exist.

In addition, dz can back up MySQL Dump backups (not recommended).

19. File and database verification:

Dz has built-in functions for file and database verification. Pw only provides an official file verification tool, but it is a bit confusing to use. Sometimes the functions prompted for use do not exist in the php file at all.

20. Theme recommendation and related posting functions:

Dz implements related posts through qihoo, and can also support topic recommendations, which is much better than pw.

21. Templates and style settings

Phpwind can set style CSS files in the background, although it is not easy for beginners to use, but it is really quite convenient.

Dz further, the content of css is interpreted as a form, so that beginners can operate, but the disadvantages are even greater: if you want to add control in CSS (such as adjusting line spacing, etc.), you don't know how to do it, so you have to modify the template. Fortunately, dz also provides an additional function: the template can be modified directly in the background, and there is a search function in the editing interface.

Dz has a greater advantage over pw in function, and in some functions where dz is better than pw, many of them win by a big advantage.

IV. Summary

Generally speaking, dz outperforms pw in terms of function, interface, technology and forum function extension. But pw is not useless, its anti-CC attack function, simple and fast interface, powerful management functions, unique hotlink protection technology, are very unique. As the saying goes, the benevolent see benevolence, the wise see wisdom, choose pw or dz, is still a personalized question, depending on whether you value one of their characteristics or not.

In addition, I feel that dz has a little problem with browser compatibility, and sometimes there are hints, such as submitting information from unknown things, checking norton internet security configuration and other annoying problems, and the dz verification code is so disgusting that I can't understand it at all, so I basically can't use it, so I have to turn it off and finish it.

It should be noted that if you are a novice, you need to choose a forum, or it is recommended to choose dz, because there are more features, the extension development of the forum is better (supsite/X-space does very well), it is easier to use, and the template is relatively simple to modify and easy to use.

Pw is only suitable for veterans and those who are not interested in forum extension features, and the template of pw is very difficult to modify, a little careless is easy to make mistakes, not suitable for beginners.

PW is suitable for entertainment stations, with high speed and many functions. Official integration of various plug-ins requires almost no maintenance.

Existing functions of pw = dz+ Bank + multiple attachments upload + online membership Statistics + Special user groups add + Holiday gifts

Thank you for reading! This is the end of the article on "what are the differences between phpwind and discuz". I hope the above content can be of some help to you, so that you can learn more knowledge. if you think the article is good, you can share it for more people to see!

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