With free and commercial integrations of phpBB3 planned for Joomla 1.5, we're soon going to have several excellent forum extensions available for Joomla.

However, for Joomla 1.0 Fireboard is still the best and easiest option. Here are three great ways to spice up your Fireboard installation:

1) Shorten Long URLs so They Don't Break the Forum
The Truncate Mambot does a great job of shortening URLs so they don't push out the sides of the forum. If you register on their site and login, the mambot download reveals itself.

2) Use the Greatest Latest Posts Module

WastedZombie.com might have an eye-poppingly bad design, but their Ultimate Forum Top Ten module is far superior to any alternative. It has a huge range of options from the usual date and time to Javascript previews of the posts and a very smooth avatar integration.

3) Provide RSS Feeds for Your Categories

FBFeed is a separate component that provides configurable feeds for your forum. You can mix and match as many categories as you want to create feeds.