Up until recently, the Website Team was a sleepy team within phpBB that acquired team members from other teams and worked behind closed doors in order to ensure the full operation of the website. It is a team that is not very well publicized nor is really known what exactly we do. It has had its lows and even fewer highs, but now the need is too great to keep our operation small and closed.
The past
This historically small team has been known to take current phpBB team members in prior to their departure, during a time where it is not easy for them to contribute much at all. General website maintenance fell to the team’s themselves, each of them taking care of their patron area of the website. While this worked for a while, it has caused more issues than it was worth. Our website is inundated with duplicate CSS, inefficiency in JavaScript, and general chaos in the backend code.
The present
During the past year, the website team has been making the transition from a sleepy team who takes care of few things to a more active team that handles day-to-day maintenance and testing prior to deployment of the website.
We’ve picked a few members and lost many. This is mainly due with the fact that this is only team where it is impossible to get help directly from the community because it’s an internal codebase. It may not have been very noticeable, but any team member the website team picked up was formerly on another team within phpBB.
The future
Currently, we have serveral maintenance projects we are overseeing and one very large project that’s early in development. Unfortunately, we are not in a position to announce these at the moment. I do think it is worth mentioning though, for we are eventually looking to adopt a more open model, even going so far as to release some new code we’re writing on github in an effort to pick up contributors.
To do so, however, we’ll need some help. The future of phpBB.com is a blank slate–and we’re looking for designers, programmers, and other individuals with skills who can help draft the slate into a reality. If you’d like to help out, and have the time and ability to do so, please contact Sam with samples of your work (P.S. being active on the forums on phpbb.com and Area51 are a huge plus). This is your opportunity to make an impact on the phpBB project for users, developers, team members, and more.