phpBB 3.1 launch

Bleistivt

phpBB is about to release version 3.1, almost 7 years after the 3.0 release:

https://www.phpbb.com/about/launch/

They basically restructured/rewrote the whole framework and added features, that other forum solutions have had for years.
Thank god they got rid of MODs, I have painful memories of having to walk through all files and apply code changes manually on every update.

Funny story:
When I first took a look at vanilla 1 in 2009 and decided against it, because it seemed too simple I was thinking something along the lines of "I'll just wait for phpBB 3.1 which is to be released soon anyway".

Nonetheless, their developement setup is impressive, automatic daily builds, unit testing, security review etc.

thoughts?

Linc

I'm really happy for them. I'm a fan of phpBB and I've met a couple leaders of their team and very much enjoyed our conversations.

We're making big strides in unit testing, Travis builds, and the changes necessary to take our codebase to the next level.

I do, however, feel like advertising your number of security incidents over the last four years, when you've not done a major release, is a bit disingenuous. Vanilla's basically been rewritten in that span of time while doing releases all along the way, so I feel like it's a bit apples-to-oranges. If they make it thru 2015-16 with the same record I'll be more impressed. That said, I do appreciate how seriously they take security.

x00

However that has been part of their strategy their release cycle.

I think they do what they do very well. It as worth copying some of their good ideas, especially some of their processes, or at least influenced.

I think Vanilla is a completely different concept to phpBB, so there is room for both.

It is worth pointing out that there is still sites on phpBB2 which is a monolith.

phpBB basically benefited form entering the market early, they have a large team.

My initial thoughts is a bit like wordpress there have improve the core, but it remains to bee seen how far they can go. They talk abut "MVC like" is this single dispatcher? I suspect they still have multiple entry points.

I really like the idea of explicit routes and reverse lookup like django. The convention based implicit hooks has some limitations. Maybe something in-between would work. Vanilla routes don't count becuase the aren't directly linked to the controller they have no influence over the linkage either.

hgtonight

Looks like they are taking serious strides to making it a better place. I applaud that.

peregrine

It will be interesting to see as it progresses.

Bleistivt

@x00 said:
My initial thoughts is a bit like wordpress there have improve the core, but it remains to bee seen how far they can go. They talk abut "MVC like" is this single dispatcher? I suspect they still have multiple entry points.

All the "controller" logic seems to still be in viewforum.php, viewtopic.php, etc.
But it ships with an app.php similar to vanillas index.php which is a single entry point for extension controllers. So extensions can actually create pages with pretty urls.

One thing I find interesting is how they pass variables from the current scope to event handlers by using compact() and extract():

https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/blob/86c472/phpBB/viewtopic.php#L1054-L1065

Oh, and we need a release countdown like that for 2.3!