phpbb3 RC2 follow up and review

Well, seeing as phpbb3 has released the second release candidate I went ahead and installed it for kicks. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected - however, it wasn’t exactly great either. There weren’t any major improvements to it that I could tell, except for a better design. It still falls short of both paid and free software, namely vbulletin, ipb, and mybb.

A few things that really frustrated me with the new phpbb3 release candidate were:

  • No default permissions for usergroups. This was a huge problem for me at first. I could not figure out why, once I added a forum or category, I couldn’t see it on the forum homepage. After about half an hour I figured out it was because everyone - administrators included - had the default permissions of “none.” I couldn’t view or editor or post anything until I changed the permissions. What makes this worse is that I had to do that for every forum and category added for every usergroup. As far as I can tell there’s no way to copy permissions except during the initial creation.
  • phpbb’s stubborn insistence of placing buttons “backwards.” Look at it. Do they really have to reverse the “preview” and “submit” button? I mean, honestly.
  • Missing basic functions and permissions. For example, I wanted to edit signature permissions. I can’t find it anywhere.
  • Inversed postbit - what’s up with that? Why have the user info on the right when, by tradition, it’s on the left?

So far I’ve been a little frustrated with it.

See a live user end demo at my new Reaper Forum, a forum for the new tv show coming this fall, Reaper.

July 4, 2007 | Under PHPBB |  

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