Posted by hanakin in Development, Styles with the tags Chameleon, design, end, front, front-end, future, prosilver, theme on September 16th, 2018

In 2007 phpBB stepped into a new era with its release of the now infamous “prosilver” theme. One decade ago we pushed the envelope of what a forum should look like, how it should function, and how we build and customise themes.
This year we are announcing our plans to go where no forum has ever gone before. We are starting on a journey to venture outside the scope of our current galaxy to a place far far away.
In search of an experience so groundbreaking, so shocking, that you will not want to miss the excitement. So suit up and strap on your jetpacks in preparation for the launch of something revolutionary. In the following blog post, we will be outlining the plans for the coming time and show you some screenshot of things we’ve been working on.

Over the course of the next year or so we will update you on the progress and outline everything in complete detail. For now, you can see the full scope of some of the components we’ve been working on over here.
In relation to this we are also standing up a new Front-end Development team, as we will be leveraging a lot of advanced forward thinking processes, techniques, common practices, and technologies; more to come on the specifics. To do this we will need to bring on several new motivated and talented individuals to work on and help oversee this mission through.

With that said if you think this is something you may be interested in and/or are qualified for, please private message or email me with your qualifications, examples and a brief description of why you think you would make a good addition to this project.

In the meantime head over to the to Styles in Development topic of the new style to track the status of the work and get further details and discussion to help contribute. You can also have a look at the repo over at Github and head over to the Area51 “Styles Development” forum for specific discussion related to the development itself.
Below are some more screenshots from the components we’ve been developing:


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Posted by battye in Extensions, Modifications, Styles, Uncategorized with the tags bbcodes, bridges, converters, Extensions, language packs, MODs, Styles on November 16th, 2016
MODs, extensions and styles are what immediately come to mind when thinking of the phpBB.com customisation database, but there are other types of customisations too.
This part of phpBB Numerology takes a look at every type of customisation.
Overview of all customisation downloads:

There are some obvious anomalies in the data (like the Viewtopic Birthday MOD) which haven’t been removed from this raw analysis. With that said, this data still gives a fairly accurate representation of how people use the customisation database.
The first figure that sticks out in this table is the the 52.02 views per download for bbCode. This is disingenuous. Taking the fairly popular bbCode “Open URL in new window” as an example, it’s had 8026 views and 0 downloads. Why is this? Because there is nothing to download – the instructions are on the main contribution page: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/bbcode/open_url_in_new_window/
MODs, due to their prevalence in the phpBB2 and phpBB 3.0 era, are still the undisputed king of the customisation database and will take some catching up. Styles may catch up in the medium term though, as it’s a forever expanding customisation type in phpBB 3.1.
It’s not surprising to see phpBB tools well represented on the list. AutoMOD and UMIL alone represented 208757 and 151820 downloads respectively – very popular tools. Converters and Bridges round out the top 8, being quite niche categories.
As noted earlier, the figures may be a little high due to anomalies but after taking into account off-site downloads through development topics and the like the numbers may actually be conservative. It’s therefore very pleasing for everyone involved in the phpBB community, and something to be very proud of, that phpBB customisations have exceed 15 million downloads.
For the fifth and final part of phpBB Numerology we’ll go back to where it all started – extensions – and take a closer look at the categories of extensions that are most popular.
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Posted by igorw in Development, Modifications, Styles with the tags Git, github, guidelines on November 13th, 2010
After the phpBB core migrated to GitHub earlier this year, most of the sub-projects have now been moved as well.
The initiative begun during the Libertyvasion conference, where we moved the UMIL, AutoMOD and MPV repositories. After that the customisation database and the support toolkit followed. Last night we moved the remaining MOD team projects: MODX, and the MODX Editor, Generator, Creator and finally QuickInstall.
I’m really excited about this relocation because of the huge contribution potential Git and GitHub have to offer. We have already seen a few translators take the hurdle to learn Git, and it makes the whole translation submission process a lot more open. There have also been a few patch contributions, and all I can say is keep those patches coming!
Now with all these public repositories accepting contributions, we need some guidelines. For this reason we came up with a set of Sub-Project Contribution Guidelines. We tried to keep them as short as possible, here is the substantial part:
- Projects should be hosted on GitHub under the phpBB organization.
- All work by team members should take place in the main repo.
- Use of topic branches is very strongly encouraged.
- Contributors _must_ use topic branches, foreign main branches are never merged.
- Version tags must be fully lowercase and prepended by a ‘v’, for example ‘v1.0.0-rc1’.
- Branch names should simply describe the topic and use hyphens, for example ‘quick-reply’ or ‘issue1234’.
- Translations should have a branch named ‘intl-<lang>’, for example ‘intl-de’.
- Projects with many core contributors can use forks.
Please do read the full guidelines, as they include some additional information.
I am happy to announce that we have completed our GitHub invasion and are feeling very much at home. Fork away!
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Posted by Kellanved in Development, Moderating, Modifications, Styles, Support with the tags 3.0.6, CAPTCHAs, MODs, Styles on June 27th, 2009
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 »
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Posted by Acyd Burn in Development, Modifications, Styles with the tags Community, Development, Features, phpBB on June 10th, 2009
Here we are. phpBB 3.0.5 got released and work on phpBB 3.0.6 began. Previously, we concentrated on fixing bugs and only introduced tiny new features. This time, phpBB 3.0.6 will be a “feature” release, packed with numerous new, cool, stunning, breath-taking… err, just new features. 😉 We will now tell you which new features are planned for 3.0.6 and what style authors and modders need to take care of.
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Posted by battye in Development, Moderating, Modifications, Styles, Support with the tags phpbb blog on April 14th, 2009
I touched on this in an article at my own site last month, but it is worth mentioning here as well.
This blog currently covers a wide range of topics relating to how to run your forum (How many forums should I create?, How Many Moderators Do You Really Need?, etc), to technical aspects about phpBB and MODs (Injection Vulnerabilities, Templating just got easier, etc) and even general posts about the phpBB project itself (Talkin bout Area51, Londonvasion Re-Cap – phpBB Ascraeus, etc). We would like some feedback from the community to get an idea about the sort of things you would like to read in the blog posts.
Our questions to you is: are there any topics in particular you would like to see posted in the blog? Are there other categories of articles (besides the ones mentioned above) which we need to focus on more?
Please give us your feedback by replying in the comments box below.
Thanks!
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Posted by Kellanved in Development, Modifications, Styles, Support with the tags Internet Explorer, Security, Uploads on October 25th, 2008
Recently we got many bug reports about problems with the IE8 beta browsers. The problem is that we cannot accommodate beta browsers in our software – the next beta will break our adjustments. But why have we chosen to include some other IE8 features? The answer is simple: security
This post will give you insights into one of the more obscure security implications of file uploads.
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Posted by Highway of Life in Development, Modifications, Styles with the tags Contributing, Documentation, wiki on September 9th, 2008
If you have not yet read the phpBB Wiki Announcement or have not followed the discussion topic. I would encourage you to do so and take a look at the new development wiki:
http://wiki.phpbb.com
What is a Wiki and what can I do with it?
A Wiki is a type of website that allows the users and visitors to add, remove, and edit the available content. — Anyone who is interested in working with the phpBB Codebase, from website administrators who want to integrate phpBB into their site, or create a quick-script, to bridge or application developers to bridge phpBB with their application, to MOD Authors. The wiki is for those who want to learn more about the phpBB Codebase or simply have a question about how to do something or how something works within phpBB.
The wiki is also a great way to learn about how to begin programming in PHP/phpBB and developing a MOD.
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Posted by Development Team in Development, Styles with the tags Features, Londonvasion, Olympus, Styles, Templates on July 31st, 2008
One of the advantages of a face-to-face meeting is that feature requests and feature discussion can be much more effective; at least if it is about minor window dressing as opposed to huge changes. To curb the wave of requests right here: you should have been there, the opportunity has passed
. People watching the SVN repository may know already: there were some major changes in the past two weeks. A lot is moving right now in the active branches, but that’s for future posts.
Today it is a great pleasure for us to unveil a new feature for the 3.0 branch, to be released with 3.0.3: Template Inheritance.
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