phpBB • Creating Communities Worldwide

A very common question about phpBB is how to display recents posts or topics on a separate page, such as a website homepage. It can be very handy to do this, as it allows visitors to your website a chance to quickly see recent activity.

This blog post details how displaying a list of recent posts and topics externally can be done. There are a couple of different formats that are covered:

• The latest topics (including only from specified forums)
• The first post of the latest topics (including from specified forums)
• The latest posts from specified topics
• The latest posts from the entire forum

Everything displayed is subject to the users forum read permissions.

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As the title already says, this blog post will describe how the MOD Team validates modifications and what happens to them before they come out at the other end of the queue.

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As previously stated every team will announce in what way it will be affected by the significant phpBB development changes. This post will explain the effects on the modifications team.

Versioning scheme

Since phpBB will be using a new versioning scheme we will adopt this scheme for all of our tools (AutoMOD, UMIL, etc).

MOD authors will be encouraged to use this new versioning system too. We will however be less strict in enforcing it. In fact, we will allow any versioning that is compatible with version_compare, so versions such as 1.0.0.0 will be allowed. We will still require it to be stable though.

Additionally we will release a new version of MODX to support this and adapt our tools where needed.

phpBB 3.0

Because phpBB 3.0 is not going to change we don’t have to adopt any changes. This will just continue as it has been so far.

phpBB 3.x

Depending on what changes will be made to the modding API we will assist MOD authors in using it and provide documentation. All in all, it will highly depend on how many changes will be made to phpBB itself. There are a lots of improvements we can think of, and we will try and get them implemented where possible.

We will allow submission of modifications for new phpBB branches once they are released. We will support the branches that are supported globally.

phpBB 4.0

The release of phpBB 4.0 is way too far ahead for us to be able to say anything at all about it. It is a fresh start and will possibly bring many new possibilities. We can be pretty sure that the new architecture will have an impact on modding that will change it fundamentally. We will wait and see. And work together with the development team.

The future

We have some great plans waiting for the MOD writing community. These include building more advanced infrastructure and tools, as well as making alterations to the MODX standard. We will work on making the workflows of modification engineering more efficient. More information will follow in due time.

– The Modifications Team

Note: This post is targeted at MOD authors and contains many technical details.

Introduction

Amongst the great security features that phpBB 3.0 provides is the function used for processing user input, request_var.  This function was designed to make it easy to securely retrieve user inputted data.  It is one of the most important security functions in a system that retrieves external data as it can (with caveats that will be elaborated upon) single-handedly stop XSS and SQL injection attacks dead in their tracks

The reason we have created this blog post is to give more information to modification developers on how to properly explain how this works and why you should use it.

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This blog post outlines the key points you must consider if you are going to set up a forum. It is mainly directed to people who have not set up a forum before, but it might also be helpful to existing forum owners who are thinking about creating more in the future.

Feel free to print this page out and work through the list. Read the rest of this entry »

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)

In an effort to increase our connections with the community at large, the phpBB Teams are glad to announce the creation of our newest community effort – a series of question and answer sessions entitled “Meet The Team”. This series is focused on helping you, the end user, learn a bit more about us, the programmers, supporters, moderators, and designers that help keep phpBB.com running smoothly and phpBB the most popular free bulletin board on the internet.

This series, with regular updates (depending on team member and question availability), will focus on asking team members the questions you want to know about them. These questions should not be directly phpBB-related (when does the next version of phpBB come out, etc.), but should instead be on a more personal note (what is your favourite ice cream flavour, favourite movie, most recent thing you purchases, etc.). We will try to answer every question you ask us, provided they have some genuine reasoning behind them, are not overly invasive of privacy, and that they are not directly phpBB-related (as above).

If you wish to contribute to the questions for the first portion of this series, please visit this phpBB Discussion topic. While you’re there, feel free to look over previously-asked questions and second them if you too would like to see them answered. Upon the completion of each portion of the series, a new topic will be posted to gather further questions for the next portion.

Thank you for your interest in getting to know the phpBB Teams — we hope to let you know a bit more about ourselves soon!

You probably have already heard about it: the next release will include a host of new features. This post will present one of them in detail, showing the idea and the impact on users, style and MOD authors.

Most admins are experiencing problems with spam, which is taking away lots of energy that would be better spent on the enjoyable parts of administrating a community. We tried our best in the arms race against spambot programmers, but have to admit failure with our previous approach. Since 3.0.x became as popular as it is, any default visual confirmation gets broken almost instantly. After long discussion in and outside the teams, we came to the conclusion that diversity is the answer: every board admin should be able to use a non-default anti-bot measure without it being a pain. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Support forums hundreds of support posts are made daily. People who have a problem, or just a question they’d like to ask. It’s hard to answer all of those questions. Sometimes we need more information in order to get a better view of the problem to solve it.

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phpBB is continuing its process of opening up the development process. After an internal trial phase we have now opened up the Junior Developer Team to regular members of our community. An increasing amount of people involved in phpBB development should both speed up the development and improve quality.

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