1) Go to Industry Standard nomenclature for items. Call a Category a Category and a Thread a Thread... its much less confusing to people who aren't used to Liferay

2) Add some features. God help us... end users like stupid stuff... like smilies, in forums. If you want to pull a feature set, go to http://www.simplemachines.org/ SMF is probably one the best and most popular forum software packages. It's fairly easy to administer and users just love it.

3) Look at phpBB as well. It's also very popular and widely used. http://www.phpbb.com/mods/db/

4) There needs to be a built in forum moderator role.

5) Threads need to be able to be "pulled" from the forums on someone's page to a group page and maybe even a community or org page.


A big deal for most forums is the ability to customize easily without having to be a professional developer or system administrator. Adding smilies, mods, etc. so that you can make the default forums into YOUR forums for YOUR community is usually a big deal. Both of those solutions are very skinnable.