phpBB Modders

Hey, I'm Dion. I no longer hang out on phpbb.com but have been involved with phpBB since 2005. Through the years I've stretched the limits of what phpBB can do, first with MODs and then with extensions. I have a board (phpBB 3.0.14 running on PHP 8.1) that contains a large number of phpBB 3.0 MODs, including a set of patches to make phpBB 3.0.14 compatible with PHP 8.3.

From a phpBB standpoint, these days I mostly write custom scripts/extensions for clients that want something not available in phpBB or its extension database. I plan to upload some of them here, with one of the first being a replacement common.php file that implements "safe mode" for phpBB via a define('PHPBB_SAFEMODE', true) statement in config.php.

Anyway, talk to you all soon!

Welcome!

Dion wrote: Fri Dec 06, 2024 5:36 pm I have a board (phpBB 3.0.14 running on PHP 8.1)

Why 3.0.14? Curious of your reasoning.

Welcome to the modders forum

Kailey wrote: Fri Dec 06, 2024 7:35 pm Why 3.0.14? Curious of your reasoning.

My two public phpBB boards (both with little activity these days) have been around for 11 and 13 years. They are very heavily modified and I saw no reason to think about newer versions of phpBB...that is, until PHP7.0 was released. I thought about it, and I decided it was worth the time and effort to patch phpBB 3.0.12+ to make it compatible with PHP 7.0. That was 8 years ago, and I've continued to update the patches as new versions of PHP have been released. At this point I see no reason whatsoever to convert the boards to a newer version of phpBB.

There are a large number of people who still use phpBB 3.0, several of whom have been clients for many years. Some use phpBB 3.0 because they have small/cheap hosting that doesn't meet the phpBB 3.3 requirements. Some because their boards are so heavily modified that it isn't worth the effort to convert to a newer version of phpBB. Still others enjoy that phpBB 3.0 was built from a geek/hacker standpoint where small code size and good performance was a high priority. Those people (including myself) believe that the rampant use of package managers (Composer/NPM/etc) has created mass bloat in today's PHP/JS scripts...why sit down and write 50 lines of code when you can simply-and-easily grab a package (and its dependencies) that uses hundreds (if not thousands) of lines of code in dozens of files to accomplish what 50 lines of original code in a single file would have accomplished? (I'll say it here: IMO the addition of Doctrine to phpBB4 will be a "jump the shark" moment for phpBB.)

My guess is that few of the above people will convert to phpBB 3.3, and given the already-large resource requirements of the alpha snapshot builds of phpBB4, virtually none will convert to phpBB4.

Sorry for veering off on a tangent. I hope I answered your question. If not, I'll do my best to clarify.

Dion wrote: Fri Dec 06, 2024 11:23 pm I hope I answered your question. If not, I'll do my best to clarify.

You're good!