phpBB3: Open Source Forum Software Evolved

The 13th of December, 2007 marked the beginning of another chapter of the success story that is open source software, as phpBB version 3 was released. phpBB, an open source bulletin board system, was created by James Atkinson in 2000 as a forum solution for his wife. From its low-key beginnings, phpBB has gone from strength to strength, earning itself a reputation as one of the "killer apps" for the PHP scripting language.

The bulletin board concept dates back to the 1980s, when the earliest forms took shape as newsgroups and primitive dial-up message boards. With the introduction of the Web, bulletin boards, now commonly known as internet forums, have become incredibly user friendly and customisable, and have played a key role in the current social networking trend. It should therefore come as no surprise that on the Internet today there are many millions of active forums, a significant number of which are phpBB installations.

phpBB was first released in April 2002, and has enjoyed constant evolution by an active developer community. In May 2007, the first of eight release candidates was made available to the public. The release candidate stage was lengthy, but ensured that the official release, phpBB v3.0.0, was of a very high standard.

Changes Between phpBB2 and phpBB3

To many people, phpBB2 will be remembered for its revolutionary theme, subSilver, whose combination of simple and slick allowed for a very attractive default theme. Considering it's now nearly five years old, the design of the subSilver theme still holds up pretty well.

Change is inevitable, though, and perhaps the most noticeable difference that a user sees when comparing a forum that uses phpBB2 to one that uses phpBB3 will be the front-end code used by the board -- especially if you dive under the hood. While the colour schemes between the new proSilver theme and subSilver are quite similar, proSilver has quite noticeably distanced itself from a table-based layout. Many people will be pleased to know that the new style is CSS driven, and is XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. Tables have only been used when appropriate, for instance, in the display of tabular data such as statistics and the member list.

phpBB3 (codenamed Olympus) also includes many features requested by the phpBB community. Features that were only available as modifications in phpBB2 are now available as standard functionality.

Some of the more popular additions include those relating to:

• file attachments
• user and moderator control panels
• the ability to add unlimited layers of forums (subforums)

From an administrative perspective, the largest change comes in the permissions system. While the administration control panel has been completely revamped (it now uses a truly modular system), getting your head around the new permissions system is perhaps the most difficult part of upgrading. The new permission system allows for finer, more granular permission assignment, as well as many new permissions that administrators are able to assign. For easier management, permission roles are included, as is the ability to copy and transfer permissions from other forums. An in-depth overview of the new permissions system forms part of the phpBB documentation.

Notably absent from phpBB3 is an inbuilt modification (MOD) installer. However, as was the case with phpBB2, an official add-on will be published by the phpBB MOD Team for performing automatic MOD installations. Codenamed Blinky, the MOD installer is a modular addition to the administration control panel, which adds a new MODs tab to the administration navigation.

When installing a modification, the MOD installer will read and parse an XML file, storing information about the desired MOD to be installed. Various actions are performed on the basis of this XML file, such as adding, replacing, and removing code. This MOD installer is still under development, but the development team behind Blinky hopes to have something released soon.

The image below shows the details of the MOD installation, which only appear if enabled by the administrator, or if an error occurred.

Below, we see the flexibility in the MOD Manager. The code has three different methods to handle files, including FTP and the creation of a compressed archive.