E-Blah

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E-Blah

A new standard installation of E-Blah
Developer:	Justin Osborne
Latest release:	10.2.5 / March 6, 2007
Use:	Internet forum
License:	GNU General Public License
Website:	http://www.eblah.com/

E-Blah is a free open source Internet forum software written in the Perl programming language. E-Blah is available under the GNU General Public License.

1 History
2 Features
3 Technology
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

E-Blah started as a pet project by Justin Osborne in December 2001 to test his programming abilities. The project was scraped a week into production. A week after being cancelled, Justin Osborne restarted the project from scratch in the intention of creating a mainstream forum product. Within the next several months, four beta versions were released, each improving on the quality of the previous by eliminating bugs and adding new features. During the summer of 2003, E-Blah grew into a functional production-use forum software and a final version was released as E-Blah Platinum 5.^[1] E-Blah Platinum 5 was mentioned in the June 2005 edition of BPI News due to being used by a British minilab community.^[2]

After the release of E-Blah Platinum 5, several updates were released which established E-Blah as a well-rounded forum software due to the facet of available features. These updates added features such as automation of forum installation, sub-categories, gzip compression, CAPTCHA verification, and also included rewritten code to improve performance and security. The last release of the Platinum series was E-Blah Platinum 9.71B which improved the way E-Blah handled e-mail, AJAX functions, and calendar notes.^[3]

Following E-Blah Platinum 9.71B, Justin Osborne started developing the E-Blah 10 series which would replace the E-Blah Platinum series. The first E-Blah 10 series release was E-Blah 10.0 which featured a rewrite of many of the core components which among other things provided XHTML compliance, RSS feed integration, and spam protection powered by Akismet.^[4] The latest release of the E-Blah 10 series is E-Blah 10.2.5 which features improved XHTML compliance, improved security, cosmetic changes, and bug fixes^[5] and the ability for advanced forum administrators to add Perl code to their template.^[6] The latest code changes can be downloaded prior to official release through available nightly builds.^[7] E-Blah can currently be found on various hosting providers.^[8]

E-Blah SQL, a feature-limited version of E-Blah 10 powered by MySQL or SQLite (by choice of forum administrator), is currently available in beta form.^[9]

[edit] Features

Key features of E-Blah include:

RSS syndication of the overall forum content.^[10]
A simplified theme system that allows easy customization of the forum's look.^[11]
Advanced security features to prevent unauthorized access and prevent unintended modification of the forum.^[12]
Internationalization support with five functional language packs available as of January 2007.^[13]
Free technical support available through the community.^[14]
Spam protected powered by Akismet.^[15]
Tools to convert forums from other major forum software to E-Blah.^[16]

[edit] Technology

E-Blah contains the forum data it collects within a flat file database system. Once the forum software parses the data from the flat file database it will output through either XHTML or an RSS feed. Developers can allow their applications to access the member data through E-Blah's optional API. The API sends the requested data to the client application through the use of XML.^[17]

E-Blah was designed to require very little system resources and thus has the low server requirements of Perl 5, CGI.pm, and 2MB of disk space. The low server requires of E-Blah is partly attributed to the use of Perl and a flat file database system.^[18] E-Blah takes advantage of recent trends in web design which include the use of AJAX, XHTML, CSS, and RSS.

E-Blah works in a modular system that allows easy customization of the forum software. These customizations include localization through language packs, changes to core files through modifications, and themes through template files.^[19]