phpBB is a Joke

December 2, 2007 | Under Forum Software, PHPBB | Leave a Comment 

If, five years ago, you would have asked me what forum software I’d recommend using, I would have said phpBB. I was ignorant and inexperienced ; telling you to use phpBB would probably have been some of the worst advice I could give you. While I’ve come a long way form what I was five years ago, it seems that phpBB has been going in the opposite direction. PhpBB has been developing their 3.X series for the past four or five years. While this is an unusually long development time, one might expect an abundance of new features. While there are many new features to phpBB, phpBB still lacks many of the basic forum features that other forum softwares - both free and paid - currently offer. Not only is phpBB void of many features and their development sluggish, they just can’t seem to get it right.

Today they’ve just release RC8. Back in October they released to Release Candidates - withing 48 hours. Honestly, what kind of software group takes over four years to develop their next version and release 8 Release Candidates? More release candidates from this software group are sure to come before it goes Gold. It’s typical for a software company to have a RC2 or RC3, but much after that is a bit ridiculous.

If you’re new to the forum business I’d highly recommend you look at phpBB with a weary eye. If you’re looking for a free solution I strongly suggest myBB. PhpBB might be something a new forum administrator might want to mess around with, but if you’re serious about running a forum, stay away from this software.

phpbb3 RC2 follow up and review

July 4, 2007 | Under PHPBB | Leave a Comment 

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.

phpbb3 RC2 - Released

July 4, 2007 | Under PHPBB | Leave a Comment 

From the official phpbb website at www.phpbb.com:

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB3 RC2 package. This is the second release candidate which is meant to become the Gold release if no more bugs or problems arise. Of course there may be more release candidates.

On release candidates full support is given, allowing language packs as well as modifications and styles. We only give support to those having a clean RC installation or updates from RC1, previous conversions or updates from betas will not be supported here. We encourage only those running the release candidates wanting to test out the new version, it is still recommended to wait for the full release; after all this is a release candidate.

During the last weeks the convertor have seen a lot of bugfixes and updates, guaranteeing a much more stable conversion as well as numerous updates. Please refer to the complete changelog for a detailed list of fixes since RC-1:

http://www.phpbb.com/support/documents. … &version=3

To re-iterate the support guidelines, we won’t support the following installation types:

  • Updates from phpBB3 Beta versions to phpBB3 RC1 and higher
  • Conversions from phpBB 2.0.x to phpBB3 Beta versions
  • phpBB3 Beta installations

We give support for the following installation types:

  • Updates from phpBB3 RC1 to any higher version
  • Conversions from phpBB 2.0.x to phpBB3 RC1 and higher
  • New installations of phpBB3 RC1 and higher

A short explanation of how to do a conversion is included within the provided INSTALL.html file, please be sure to read it. If you want to be on the safe side we suggest still waiting for later releases before you fully convert your 2.0.x installation.

Regarding language packs you may have installed: Please be sure to update your language pack after updating or switch back to the english language pack. Else you may see php notices arising - please do not report any bugs regarding php notices within the posting screen if you have a language pack installed dating back to prior RC2 Release.

Minimum Requirements

phpBB3 has a few requirements which must be met before you are able to install and use it.

  • A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System with support for PHP
  • A SQL database system, one of:
    • MySQL 3.23 or above (MySQLi supported)
    • PostgreSQL 7.3+
    • SQLite 2.8.2+
    • Firebird 2.0+
    • MS SQL Server 2000 or above (directly or via ODBC)
    • Oracle
  • PHP 4.3.3+ (>=4.3.3, >4.4.x, >5.x.x, >6.0-dev (compatible)) with support for the database you intend to use.
  • getimagesize() function need to be enabled
  • These optional presence of the following modules within PHP will provide access to additional features, but they are not required.
    • zlib Compression support
    • Remote FTP support
    • XML support
    • Imagemagick support
    • GD Support

The presence of each of these optional modules will be checked during the installation process.

Security

Security issues found should be reported to our security tracker in the usual way.

Available packages

Since this is the first time our new automatic updater will be run on thousands of installations we recommend using the “changed files only” method for updating if you experience problems, especially if you modified your installation. Please report any bugs you notice within our bug tracker.

With this release, there are four packages available.

  • Full Package
    Contains entire phpBB3 source and english language files.
  • Changed Files Only
    Contains only those files changed from previous versions of phpBB3. Please note this archive contains changed files for each previous release.
  • Patch Files
    Contains patch compatible patches from previous versions of phpBB3.
  • Automatic Update Package
    Update package for the automatic updater, containing the changes from the last release to this release.

Select whichever package is most suitable for you.

Please ensure you read the INSTALL and README documents in docs/ before proceeding with installation, updates or conversions!.

The automatic update package does not include the file includes/utf/data/recode_cjk.php. If you use a SJIS encoding or a variant you should replace this file manually with the version included within the full package.

Download/Documentation

Have fun with the release,
the phpBB Teams.