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phpBB 3..is it worth the wait?

December 19th, 2006 | Category: php, phpbb

By Justin Silverton

phpBB is a very popular open-source bulletin board application written in php. Recently, a new development version has been released (for testing purposes only), which has many new improvements over the current version (2.X). Today, I decided to install it on one of my development servers to find out if it really is worth the wait.

Requirements

  • A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System with support for PHP
  • A SQL database system, one of:
    • MySQL 3.23 or above (MySQLi supported)
    • PostgreSQL 7.3+
    • SQLite 2.8.2+
    • Firebird 2.0+
    • MS SQL Server 2000 or above (directly or via ODBC)
    • Oracle
  • PHP 4.3.3 or above (supported: 5.0.x & 5.1.x, compatible: 6.0-dev) with support for the database you intend to use.
  • These optional presence of the following modules within PHP will provide access to additional features, but they are not required.
    • zlib Compression support
    • Remote FTP support
    • XML support
    • Imagemagick support

Installing

Installation was pretty straight forward. With this new version also comes a professional looking installer, which looks much better than previous versions.

Cool new features

A) Jabber communication.  Users can now communicate through this open source instant messenging protocol.

B) An unlimited number of subforums can be created

C) Caching.  Major performance and caching enhancements have been made which will allow it to support many more users.

D) Mod system improvements. The module system has been re-written from scratch to allow easy install of 3rd party addons/components.

Conclusion

phpBB 3 has many improvements over the previous versions and I will be installing it once it becomes stable.  One of the one features I wish would be in the next version, but I did not see on the list is spam protection.  It is the one thing that has been plaguing the phpbb community from the beginning.

More information and downloads of this new version can be found here

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7 Comments so far

  1. stefan December 19th, 2006 5:22 pm

    Spam protection is indeed one of the things missing in the current version, but this has also been picked up by a third party: http://www.bbprotection.net/ will offer a MOD that will enable you to protect yourself against spam using a centralized database.

  2. Justin Silverton December 19th, 2006 11:17 pm

    it still seems to be in development. I would rather see something that is built right into the interface, rather than a third-party mod. I think a nice akismet back-end interface/plugin might be good.

  3. Shanx January 20th, 2007 8:25 am

    Give punbb.org a try and you’ll never look back. PhpBB is slow and messy.

  4. Justin Silverton January 20th, 2007 12:08 pm

    Thanks Shanx!

    I have never heard of Punnbb, but I think I will give it a try!

  5. Mike January 30th, 2007 9:54 am

    Punbb is full of injection vulnerabilities. I suggest staying far away from them.

  6. Justin Silverton February 1st, 2007 12:35 am

    Mike, do you use it? also, does it have more vulnerabilites than phpbb?

  7. Firebird News » phpBB 3..is it worth the wait? February 8th, 2007 7:29 pm

    […] decided to install it on one of my development servers to find out if it really is worth the wait. Permalink | Share (digg, etc):             […]

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