phpbb blog
These are articles I wrote for the official phpBB blog. They are published on blog.phpbb.com
phpBB “Ascraeus” 3.1 Feature Freeze
Yesterday marked the announced feature freeze date for phpBB Ascraeus 3.1. We have postponed this date once before and we are still a bit behind schedule, but we will stick to it this time. We have picked a number of features with unfinished implementations or still in RFC phase which we believe to be very important and which can be realistically finished in time. We are still learning to work with our new development model and I’m sure we will improve until the phpBB Arsia 3.2 release. All features that are implemented or suggested after today are going to have to wait for phpBB Arsia 3.2 to become part of phpBB (small exceptions may be made).
As you can see from the list below this release is going to focus on improving a number of existing features as well as improving MOD installation & MOD writing. The following is the list of features and improvements for 3.1 in no particular order:
Merged:
- Coding Guideline Modifications RFC Ticket
- Autoloading & Class Naming Convention RFC Ticket
- Removal of subsilver2 RFC Ticket
Patch in progress:
- Improved Page Titles RFC Ticket
- Avatar improvements, Gravatar RFC Ticket
- Improved template engine RFC Ticket
- SQLite 3.0+ Support RFC Ticket
- Updated BBcode engine RFC
- Request Class RFC Ticket
- Switch to PHP timezone handling RFC Ticket
- Modular Cron RFC Ticket
- General Hook Architecture RFC Ticket
- Resume support for attachments / HTTP range support RFC Ticket
- Soft Delete RFC Ticket
- Enhanced Team Page RFC Ticket
- Improve User Pruning feature RFC Ticket
- Rename MSNM to WLM RFC Ticket
- Link global announcements to forumsRFC Ticket
- Simple message API RFC Ticket
- Attachments Management RFC Ticket
- MOD Installer RFC Ticket
- Cleaning up the ACP UI RFC Ticket
- No db storage of themes and stylesheets RFC Ticket
RFC only:
- Migrations (UMIL) RFC Ticket Data Providers RFC
- Changing IP banning to use ‘longest prefix matching’ RFC Ticket
- Ability to delete auto login keys RFC Ticket
- Authentication Plugin Refactoring, User Integration & OpenID RFC Ticket
- Session Backend Abstraction (memcache support) RFC Ticket
- Search Backend Refactoring RFC Ticket
- Pre-Compile Template Includes RFC
- Overridable imageset and theme paths for CDNs RFC
I would like to thank the rest of the development team for their work so far, and am looking forward to to finishing the first release of Ascraeus together with them. A special thank you goes to all the other volunteers who have brought great ideas to the proposal process and have provided us with high quality patches. They have really made me appreciate our active community and I’m looking forward to more collaboration during the next steps toward 3.1. You can find a list of all the contributors who have written code that was already merged at github This list will gain in length over the coming months as more of the proposed changes are merged.
Please discuss this blog post on the forum.
phpBB at Jump In! camp in Switzerland and on the Microsoft Web App Gallery
Last month, three phpBB developers spent a few days at Jump In! Developers’ Camp in Feusisberg, Switzerland. The event was organised by Microsoft for developers of a variety of open source PHP applications. We met with Microsoft engineers to learn more about SQL Server, the Web Platform Installer, Windows Azure and a few other technologies. In a beautiful setting we had time to work on a number of phpBB projects relating to those technologies and we had many insightful conversations with both Microsoft employees and other participants of the event. If you need video proof, Microsoft has provided it.
(link via Yuriy Zaytsev on Twitter)
Henry Sudhof (kellanved), Chris Smith (ToonArmy / cs278), and me (Nils Adermann / naderman) appear in order beginning around the one minute mark.
One result of this conference was a test release, phpBB 3.0.7-PL1 with MSSQL Server Driver for PHP. This includes a patch largely contributed by Chris Pucci of Microsoft adding a phpBB database abstraction layer for their SQL Server Driver for PHP. Apart from many improvements over existing methods of using Microsoft SQL Server from PHP it also enables phpBB to use SQL Azure, a relational database running on their cloud platform.
Resulting from the first test release we put together while in Switzerland, phpBB is now included in Microsoft’s Web Application Gallery. This makes phpBB available for easy installation through the Web Platform Installer. The Web Platform Installer is meant to simplify the installation of web applications like phpBB on Windows by automatically installing dependencies like a database and PHP.
During the event we also got phpBB running on the Windows Azure Platform, which provides the means to run PHP web applications in the cloud. The IIS web server is used to serve content from Windows Azure, so we also worked on adding IIS versions of some of the Apache web server specific files we provide. In combination with SQL Azure this kind of cloud setup should allow you to scale to a very large number of users. More information on how to set phpBB up on Azure will be provided at a later time. The MOD for storing Avatars in Azure blob storage which Henry wrote during the camp will also be published then. Chris also worked on a WinCache backend for phpBB’s cache abstraction.
The Web Platform Team also blogged about the results of phpBB’s participation in the camp.
Moving on – the future of phpBB development
About a month ago I was promoted to phpBB’s lead developer position. When I was given that role I was asked to present to the management team what my plans for phpBB are. But since they concern all of you, the phpBB community, I believe they belong here as well.
We are currently in the process of releasing phpBB 3.0.7, a smaller bug fix release of Olympus. After that development will split into multiple branches. Meik has already explained our new versioning system in a previous announcement. What this means is that after 3.0.7 is released we will start working on two branches: Ascraeus – the future phpBB 3.1, and Rhea – the future phpBB4. At the same time we will continue maintanance releases of Olympus.
Over the last few weeks we have made a few important decisions, that we believe can positively impact phpBB development. These include changes to development infrastructure as well as our development model. I will briefly outline these changes here, more details will be posted on the blog or as an announcement soon.
All of these changes have three main goals:
- All of you, phpBB’s community, have to be more involved in development
- We want to develop and release new features faster
- The software quality needs to be improved
Moving from Subversion to Git
In order to be able to better deal with greater community involvement as well as developing in multiple branches simultaneously, we have decided to switch to a new version control system.
Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed with speed and efficiency in mind, making it ideal for community collaboration. We hope to get a lot of patches and code contributions from the community so we need a way to handle these patches. A distributed version control system solves a lot of these problems. It is easier for users to fork the project make changes to it, and push those changes back into phpBB. It should also make the collaborative development of MODs and projects built on top of phpBB much easier to maintain since updating the underlying phpBB version is much easier than before. Git also makes it easier for us to track code authorship because Git differentiates between commiter and author.
phpBB “Ascraeus” 3.1
As many of you might remember Olympus originated as phpBB version 2.2, a feature release of the 2.x branch. The amount of features and resulting architecture changes was too ambitious, leading to very long winded development and the eventual realisation that not much of phpBB2 was left at all. Subsequently phpBB2.2 was renamed to phpBB3. To avoid any such issues with phpBB “Ascraeus” 3.1, there is going to be a feature freeze date. Any feature that has not been commited once this deadline is reached will have to be pushed back to 3.2. This date is going to be the 31st of May 2010. There will still be time between the feature freeze and the first beta release for finishing up the commited features, so as usual it’s done when it’s done.
In the spirit of phpBB4′s open development everybody will also be able to submit patches for phpBB3.1 development. Detailed instructions will soon be published. Additionally we plan to allow people to suggest new features, preferably in a detailed form so the implementation will be straight forward for contributors. The feature tracking system should eventually support some notion of voting on features. Popular features will be more likely to be implemented. But whether a feature really gets implemented depends largely on finding an interested contributor, there will be no guarantees based on popularity in the voting system.
phpBB “Rhea” 4.0
I wish to establish phpBB4 as a state of the art extensible object oriented PHP application. An application that will no longer be seen as a black sheep by experienced PHP developers, but instead will use a modern PHP framework and provide reusable libraries to other PHP developers. From being a good citizen of the PHP community we can gain a lot:
- We can attract more experienced PHP developers to contribute to phpBB.
- We reduce the amount of work we spend on backend details that other people have already solved, freeing up contributors for developing innovative features
- Higher code quality, thus less time spent on tedious bugfixing
- Faster development, giving us more time for cool new functionality
- We can attract users who would previously have written their own simpler forum systems using the framework of their choice
The RFC on choosing Symfony 2 as the underlying framework for phpBB4 can be found on the wiki. I believe building phpBB4 on top of Symfony 2 would be an excellent choice for phpBB. It would allow the development team to focus on building a bulletin board, using a framework built by framework experts. Other developers using Symfony 2 as a platform might become interested in contributing to phpBB.
phpBB4 is going to use the GPLv3, rather than phpBB3′s GPLv2. While we have no problem with people using phpBB3 code in GPLv3 code, we will make use of the new proxy instance in GPLv3 to make such decisions about future versions of the GPL easier without having to use the “or any later version” clause.
More developer meetings
The first larger phpBB meeting took place in London about one and a half years ago. Its main purpose was to give people a chance to get to know each other. Based on that experience the phpBB Development and Management Teams have met for a few days of discussions and coding last summer. I believe that regular meetings of this kind greatly improve communication and help keeping the project on track. To improve community participation in development future meetings should be open to all contributors rather than just development team members.
Please discuss this blog post on the forums.
Developer Meeting
The phpBB Development and Management Teams met in Cologne, Germany last week for 4 days of exciting brainstorming and coding.
We discussed future phpBB releases and worked on phpBB 3.0.6. Our plans for 3.0.6 have previously been discussed on this blog, but we decided to add even more. One feature we decided upon and implemented during the meeting was PM reports. This feature allows users to report private messages to moderators just like posts. A reported private message will then appear in a new MCP module so moderators can read the message and act upon it. This is particularly useful for users who want to report spam PMs. From this feature emerged another: emptying a user’s outbox. This option, in the Manage Users section of the ACP, allows the deletion of all unread PMs sent by a spammer.
Yet another idea we had during the meeting, which has already been announced, is the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition. I would like to urge all MOD developers to participate in this competition since a large variety of CAPTCHAs is the most effective measure against spammers. With the new CAPTCHA API, creating a CAPTCHA plugin is really simple. The example Q&A CAPTCHA Plugin, which will ship with phpBB 3.0.6, was also created during the meeting.
Details of the decisions made regarding the future of phpBB will be published in separate blog posts over the next several weeks, so make sure to check back for news! Of course, the meeting was also a great opportunity for us to get to know each other better. Most of us had already met at Londonvasion last year, but it was great to catch up with everyone again! We visited the Chocolate Museum and climbed the tower of the Cologne Cathedral. All in all, we had lots of fun too. During the meeting, we were happy to invite bantu to join the Development Team.
View from the cathedral
Team at work
Chocolate fountain
Andreas (bantu), Dominik (dhn), front: Jim (TerraFrost), back: Nils (naderman), Meik (Acyd Burn), Marek (APTX), Chris (ToonArmy), Henry (kellanved), Carolina, Yuriy (Marshalrusty), Igor (evil<3)