PhpBB

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The correct title of this article is phpBB. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
phpBB
Image:PhpBB logo.gif

A default installation of phpBB 2.0
Maintainer: The phpBB Group
Stable release: 2.0.22  (23 December, 2006) [+/-]
Preview release: 3.0 Beta 5  (28 January, 2007) [+/-]
Use: Internet forum
License: GNU General Public License
Website: http://www.phpbb.com/

phpBB is a popular internet forum package written in the PHP programming language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free software.

Contents

[edit] History

phpBB was started by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000. Nathan Codding and John Abela (both now former team members) joined the development team after phpBB's CVS repository was moved to the SourceForge, and work on 1.0.0 began. A fully-functional, pre-release version of phpBB was made available on July 1, 2000.[1]

phpBB 1.0.0 was released on December 9, 2000, with subsequent improvements to the 1.x codebase coming in two more major installments. The final release in the 1.x line was phpBB 1.4.4, released on November 6, 2001. During the lifetime of the 1.x series, Bart van Bragt, Paul S. Owen (former co-manager of the project), Johnathan Haase (now a former team member) and Frank Feingold joined the team.

phpBB 2.0.x was begun on February 17, 2001. It was developed entirely from scratch; the developer's ambitions for phpBB had outgrown the original codebase. Doug Kelly (now a former team member) joined the team shortly afterwards. After a year of development and extensive testing, phpBB 2.0.0, dubbed the "Super Furry" version, was released on April 4, 2002, three days later than intended.[2] Though initial releases supported PHP 3, recent versions of phpBB 2.0 require PHP version 4.0.3 or above. phpBB2 is not officially supported with PHP 5. Nonetheless, phpBB developers have altered the code to function better in such environments.[3]

The latest release in the 2.0.x line is 2.0.22 which was released on December 23, 2006.[4] Releases in the 2.0.x line are now restricted to bug and security fixes only.

The latest in the 3.x line is 3.0 Beta 5, which was released on January 28, 2007. phpBB 3.0 requires PHP version 4.3.3 or above, and is compatible with PHP 5. Although it is not supported, code is also present to allow phpBB3 to run under PHP 6.0.0-dev.

[edit] Future development

With the new 2.0.x codebase in a stable state, the development team, now led by Meik Sievertsen, has begun building upon and altering the codebase to produce "Olympus"; when it reaches production quality, it will be released as 3.0.0. The improvements in "Olympus" to date are comparable with the improvements between 1.4.x and 2.0.x. It was originally planned to be released as 2.2.0; however, since 2.1.x eliminated virtually all compatibility with the 2.0.x line, the version number for release was changed to 3.0.0, in keeping with the Linux kernel version.[5]

A summary of features implemented as of May 2003 exists,[6] with another more concise summary[7] dating from April of 2003. A list of new features that will be included in version 3.0.0 can be found at the phpBB development site.[8] The addition of new developers to the phpBB team has increased the pace of development from a long lull.[9]

On March 19, 2006, the development team opened a public bug tracker for the CVS version, and on June 17, 2006 the first beta version of 3.0 was released.[10] On August 12, 2006, Beta 2 was released, and fixed many bugs from the first Beta.[11] On November 12, 2006 Beta 3 was released, introducting UTF-8 support and fixing many bugs.[12]. On November 27, 2006 Beta 4 was released, fixing 100 bugs that had been found since Beta 3 was released.[13] Beta 5 was released on January 28, 2007; it is anticipated that this will be the last beta version before the Release Candidate cycle.[14]

Following a week-long server outage, the phpBB team released a new version of their website on March 18, 2007. The new site featured an all-new design based on the new "prosilver" theme by team member Tom Beddard, and the main Community forums ran 3.0.x for the first time.[15]

[edit] Features

Some of phpBB's features include:

phpBB can be scaled throughout many servers, and numerous sites have scaled phpBB sites over tens of servers.[citation needed] To make this simpler for future releases, the Olympus CVS code has many of these 'tweaks' implemented into the codebase. These tweaks range from being able to open pages within a timely manner if the topics are too large to speeding up registration.

[edit] MODs

MODs are code modifications created by the phpBB community. The term is capitalised to distinguish modifications from forum moderators. Modifications referred to in this manner are not authored by the phpBB developers, and do not enjoy the same level of support as unmodified official code. The phpBB MOD Team accepts modifications from community sources for validation, and modifications which meet the MOD Team's standards are made available for download from the phpBB MOD Database.[18] Other sites also provide modifications, both validated to their own standards and unvalidated, however the phpBB teams do not offer support for boards using MODs downloaded from sites other than phpBB.com.

[edit] Security

In December 2004, a large number of Web sites were defaced by the Santy worm, which used vulnerabilities in outdated versions of phpBB to overwrite PHP and HTML pages.

Because of this, the security of phpBB has been disputed, with a series of new versions in a relatively small timeframe addressing security issues. However the phpBB Team usually responds to security reports as soon as possible, and releases a new version quickly. The phpBB Group has also learned from a series of security issues, and phpBB 2.0.18 was released following a codebase security audit. Additionally, many things have been changed to avoid problems in the future. Among those are a re-authentication system for the administration panel (this was introduced after a cookie verification issue allowed attackers to gain administrator access), a visual confirmation system (CAPTCHA) to prevent bots from registering, as well as the substitution of the highlighting code, which was the cause for critical vulnerabilities in phpBB 2.0.10 and 2.0.15. In order to keep boards as secure as possible, administrators are urged to keep their board updated to the latest version as soon as possible. The CAPTCHA system has however proven vulnerable to automated registrations, with numerous phpBB-based forums being swamped by spam registrations.

On November 23, 2005, the phpBB Group announced a new Incident Investigation Team, a sub-team of their Support Team, which is responsible for assisting users in the cleanup and repair of an attacked phpBB installation and investigating reports of new exploits.[19] The team announced a tracker the following January where administrators of attacked bulletin boards could report an attack and receive support from the IIT.[20]

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://forums.devshed.com/showthread.php?threadid=4914
  2. ^ phpBB forum post covering history from 2000–2002
  3. ^ http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=211009 phpBB statement regarding PHP5
  4. ^ http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=489624
  5. ^ phpBB 2.2 is no more ... meet Olympus from the phpBB community forums
  6. ^ A summary of phpBB 3.0 (development) features included by May 2003
  7. ^ A concise summary of phpBB 3.0 (development) features included in April 2003
  8. ^ Olympus Feature Highlights
  9. ^ phpBB CVS statistics
  10. ^ Beta 1 announcement
  11. ^ Beta 2 announcement
  12. ^ Beta 3 announcement
  13. ^ Beta 4 announcement
  14. ^ Beta 5 announcement
  15. ^ Announcement: New Website Launched
  16. ^ [1] phpBB translation pack downloads
  17. ^ HOWTO: phpBB with Oracle
  18. ^ http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article.php?article_id=316
  19. ^ Announcing the Incident Investigation Team from the phpBB.com community forums
  20. ^ http://www.phpbb.com/support/incidents/

[edit] Further reading

  • Stefanov, Stoyan, Jeremy Rogers, 2006. phpBB: A User Guide, Packt Publishing. ISBN 1904811914
  • Douglass, Robert T., Mike Little, Jared W. Smith, 2005. Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, Apress. ISBN 1590595629
  • Stefanov Stoyan, Jeremy Rogers, Mike Lothar, 2005. Building Online Communities with phpBB 2, Packt Publishing. ISBN 1904811132

[edit] See also

Portal:Free software
 Free software Portal

[edit] External links

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