After releasing Alpha3 last week, the development team is working on fixing outstanding bugs and getting ready for the first Beta release. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we are now working on transitioning existing hard coded profile fields – such as occupation or location – to custom profile fields. The pull request converting location to a custom profile field also introduced a new option to display custom profile fields on the memberlist. As we are turning hard coded fields into custom profile fields, we are ensuring that all previous functionality can be achieved through configuration. At the same time these options can now be used for other custom profile fields you may wish to display.
Ascraeus Notifications Dropdown
As we fixed a bug regarding the display of avatars in notifications I want to use this opportunity to show you the new notifications functionality we built into phpBB Ascraeus 3.1. You may be familiar with the concept of a central location for notifications from Facebook or Google+. The idea is to provide users with a single location that will inform them about all the activity they are interested in. So far this includes notifications regarding posts, such as replies to bookmarked or subscribed topics or posts you have been quoted in, notifications regarding moderation of newly submitted posts waiting for approval and reported posts as well as notifications for new private messages and requests to join a group you lead. You can configure whether and how you would like to be notified for each of these notification types individually in the User Control Panel. The options are email, Jabber or the notification on the website. Extensions can easily add new notification types making the system very flexible.
Further we’re now testing phpBB automatically with the alpha releases of PHP 5.6 on Travis CI. A final version of PHP 5.6 is expected this summer.