phpBB • Free and Open Source Forum Software

After several months of preparations and many hours of travelling, most of our team members have arrived in Budapest for our annual team hackathon. Our meeting space was provided by L’Office Budapest. Their great team made sure we got to work in a nice environment in a lovely location. Thanks a lot for your hospitality!

Even though we’re only two days in, we’re already considering this meet-up another great success. Members from all of our different teams were present, along with GSoC student rubencm. We’ve been working on many different types of improvements for the project. A quick list of those improvements are as follows (even though we probably still miss a lot here):

• Fixing loads and loads of bugs
• Re-introducing phpBB Ideas
• Working on exciting new features (such as installing extensions from the ACP)
• Finishing up on the GSoC projects (more on that soon!)
• Mass validation of new extensions
• Website adjustments to improve user-friendliness
• Additions of many new Knowledge Base articles and tutorials
• Improvement of official Developer Documentation
• Merging and fixing existing Pull Requests

Our party consisted of: CHItA, Crizzo, DavidIQ, Derky, Elsensee, hanakin, JimA, kasimi, Marc, Marshalrusty, Nicofuma, Paul, rubencm and stevemaury.

Here are some nice pictures to make you feel like you’re here with us!

Symfony Live London and the rest of the SymfonyLive/SymfonyCon conference series are amazing conferences that bring Symfony developers together from around the world into one place for a day (or multiple days) of talks on a huge variety of Symfony related topics. Over the past few years, since our integration of Symfony into phpBB core and phpbb.com, our relationship with the Symfony community has grown. Many developers from their community now contribute to phpBB itself, something we have reciprocated in addition to sending many of our team members to Symfony conferences and meetups.

This year Symfony Live London will have a number of community sponsors of whom they will provide a sponsor booth (and much more) in order to directly communicate with many of the Symfony Community. Those projects are decided upon after the results of a public vote.

These sorts of events allow us to spread the word about phpBB and help get more people interested in working on the project, allowing us to develop phpBB to a better quality and do so faster. We are asking you, our community, to reach out and support us by voting for phpBB in their poll.

You can vote by clicking here.

Voting finishes in just a couple of days so please don’t wait. Should you wish to help support us further by spreading the word and garner us even more support, please do retweet us and share our facebook post.

Thanks!

Edit: Thanks to all who voted, we are proud to announce we have been accepted as a community sponsor of Symfony Live London 2015! If you’re in attendance do come over and say hello.

At a recent meeting of the Symfony Developers UK user group in London I gave a talk titled “How we Build phpBB: The Next Generation”.

After a brief introduction to phpBB’s functionality the talk covers different aspects of phpBB’s development. It provides insight into phpBB’s history, in particular that of its versioning, and how this affects how we operate to this day – keep in mind that we published our new release policy after this talk was presented.

The talk follows the process a feature goes through from a phpBB user’s idea all the way to making it into a phpBB release. Along the way it covers the numerous different tools used to aid us in developing phpBB; such as the issue tracker, GitHub, Bamboo, Travis CI. These tools are vital in helping our quality assurance process preventing regressions and they make it easier to develop phpBB. The talk concludes with a summary of the Symfony components we have adopted in phpBB and how we use them. It further explains why we are using more external libraries and components instead of “reinventing the wheel” as the term goes.

The talk was well received by the audience and many members of the Symfony community were positively surprised by the amount of Symfony components we now use in phpBB, by the free code and security audits performed by the styles and extensions teams on submitted customisations in order to ensure a high level of quality, and the outstanding security record that phpBB 3.x has now gained.

A video of the full talk can be found on Youtube and the slides are available on Speaker Deck. Please note that the slides may not make sense without the context of the talk.

If you run a user group or conference and are interested in having this talk, or a similar one, presented at your event by myself or another phpBB team member, please contact me or a member of the management team.

Last week phpBB again attended OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, in Portland, Oregon. Yuriy, Derk, and I had a great time chatting with those attending the conference as well as those exhibiting. We were provided booth space by Bluehost as part of their ongoing commitment to support open source projects. We had a great spot right at the front of the hall.

We arrived and set up Sunday in preparation for the Expo Hall opening Monday. Monday evening, the Expo Hall hosted a one hour first look at all the booths for conference attendees. The hour went by quickly, but after parties and further networking opportunities closed out the day. The “Elements” themed party the first night had us flying high and ready to conquer the week!

Tuesday started damp, as we would expect for Portland. This was the first full day with the exhibitors, with that night being booth crawl night when the convention center brought in food and drinks. Bluehost had Tim O’Reilly come play a game of ping-pong with them!

All week, we explored the hall and networked with other groups and attendees. We found our name on the Google Summer of Code board and chatted with the representatives of the program. We talked with someone in Community Development at O’Reilly Media about partnering with them on some interesting opportunities. And we left our mark on the giant chalkboard in the convention center hallway.

Bertie helped give away lots of gummy bears. We talked with many people about 3.1 and improvements due in the next version. We had a great response to the concept of extensions and responsive layouts. We met many conference attendees that mentioned they got their start in coding by having a phpBB forum as a teenager, which was very rewarding!

Additional highlights of the conference are available at the OSCON 2014 site.

After the German phpBB Association’s general meeting on Saturday a group of developers spent Sunday making some great progress toward a first phpBB 3.1 Beta release. The German phpBB Association runs phpBB.de – one of our many international support sites. A number of German phpBB developers – including me – are members of the German association and decided to use the opportunity to work face-to-face for a day. We were joined by phpBB.de volunteers who helped with bug triaging and pull requests and worked on translation related projects.

Sunday group picture of phpbb.com and phpbb.de team members

We managed to merge the password hashing manager which will allow us to easily transition to newer more secure password hashing algorithms in the future. It will be the basis for an easier conversion process from hashing algorithms used by other forum software. Currently switching from another forum software to phpBB requires the use of a custom authentication plugin to keep passwords working.

The refactoring of profile fields which was merged at the event will allow extensions to work with profile fields and add new types of profile fields. This is a first step toward modularizing the entire profile so that all default fields can be configured by administrators.

The group working on phpBB in Stuttgart

After a lot of debugging over the past weeks we finally worked out why our tests were failing on PHP 5.5. It turned out that PHP 5.5.7 which is used on Travis CI has a bug in the OPcache extension. The OPcache extension is the new default opcode caching mechanism in PHP 5.5 which greatly speeds up the execution of PHP code.

On our path to Alpha3 – hopefully the last Alpha release of phpBB 3.1 – we also spent some time working on bugs in the build process. These prevented us from building packages for Alpha3 so far. As a consequence we will stop providing old text format MOD files for style and language file changes. We realized the algorithm may generate incorrect results which could go unnoticed, resulting in incorrectly updated styles or language files. Instead we will provide regular patch files generated with GNU diff. Alpha3 will contain all the improvements we finished over the weekend.

After a great deal of travelling, some of us for as many as 36 hours, all 21 attendees arrived in Montréal. For the second year. the 16 team members who could make the event are joined by our Google Summer of Code students. Keeping with the spirit of phpBB’s global nature, our diverse group represents 9 different countries and speaks 12+ unique languages.

After welcoming each other and settling in at the hotel, we bonded over some food and drink at the arrival dinner. Talk quickly turned to all that we wanted to accomplish during the event, this year a full four days long.

Thursday marked the beginning of the first work day. From dawn till disk, we chipped away at the lists of items we had marked for completion. Some of highlights include:

• Finishing a new template engine for phpBB 3.1 (Twig)
• Preparing for the 3.0.12-RC1 release
• Our Google Summer of Code Projects
  
• MOD & Style Validation
• Support Documentation Improvements
• Website Improvements
• New Forum Software Converters

Check back soon for more updates on our progress and lots more photos.

This morning, after a night of coding (with some team members still having their laptops open at 4am), 18 developers descended upon the venue for yet another day of excessive productivity. After breakfast, we met up to discuss the day’s plans and broke down into groups to work on the various projects (see below). Lunch was a feast of Domino’s pizza, seasoned with shared stories of lands afar. We then continued work until the evening’s progress-meet, rounding off the work day.

We enjoyed dinner and drinks at a local restaurant/bar (photos below) and returned to the hotel for some social evening activities. Unfortunately, the hotel elevator entrapped half of our party for a while; thankfully, the wifi still worked, leading to people halfway around the world becoming aware of the situation prior to the hotel staff.

During the course of the day, many phpBB projects and tasks were completed, some of which include:

• Merging and fixing existing Pull Requests
• Fixing phpBB bugs
• Search backend bug fixes
• Adding further unit testing coverage to phpBB
• Finishing soft delete (for the tenth time)
• Working on adapting bug tickets to the new workflow
• Working on phpBB blockers such as migrations
• Work on a new notifications system
• Auto-saving functionality
• Fixing some regressions
• Ensuring functional tests are… functioning?
• MOD validation (all mods are now validated and awaiting testing)
• Style validation (all styles have now been validated and awaiting testing)
• Further work on the completion of the ideas centre
• Re-writing the website’s JavaScript to be more efficient
• Modernising the website
• Website bug fixing (all tickets are now resolved)
• Identifying areas of documentation that need expansion, simplification and updating for 3.1
• Working on testing phpBB to provide quality assurance
• Finalising some details from the new phpBB Status Site (coming soon to a website near you!)

Our party consisted of: bantu, Dhruv, nickvergessen, Marshalrusty, EXreaction, Fyrol, DavidIQ, Derky, Marc (Previously known as as marc1706), Raimon, tumba25, igorw, callumacrae, Arty, stevemaury, Paul, naderman and MichaelC (Previously known as Unknown Bliss).

Appsterdam got off to a great start this morning as 17 team and community members met in Amsterdam to work on features and bug fixes for present and future versions of phpBB, the phpBB website, the Modifications and Styles databases, and systems for providing easier and more accessible ways for community involvement in the development process.
Some of the first day’s accomplishments were:

1.  Validation of many pending MODs and styles;
2.  Improvements to AutoMOD;
3.  Updated nearly 150 pending tracker tickets;
4.  Designed better functionality, navigation and layout for an improved Documentation system;
5.  Modernized the phpBB website;
6.  Development of a new notification system for PMs, subscriptions, new posts, etc. for version 3.1;
7.  Expansion and debugging of the search system for 3.1, which will also support Sphinx and Postgres backends;
8.  Worked on creation of a new “Idea Centre” for easier proposal of features and changes to phpBB by all members of the Community.
9.  Updating of a soft delete pull-request;
10. Revised existing documentation for version 3.1.
Contributing to these accomplishments were Arty, bantu, callumacrae, DavidIQ, Derky, Dhruv, EXreaction, igorw, Marc, Marshalrusty, MichaelC, naderman, nickvergessen, Paul, Raimon, stevemaury and tumba25.

Following the success of last year’s meetup in Manchester, we decided to build up the tradition by holding another UK-based event, this time in London.

Meetups are a great way of putting faces to (user)names and getting to know the people behind the code. Quite a few phpBB team members and several community members were able to attend

We planned to assemble at 11:00 in a local Starbucks, but, in the true spirit of ambiguity, did not realize that there were actually five Starbucks locations on the same road. Not for nothing, however, are we experts in remote communication! Once the confusion was resolved, we congregated at Nandos for lunch and drinks.

Most of our time was spent taking pictures of others taking pictures of Bertie (for the masterpieces themselves, see the event topic). No London meetup is complete without a trip to the London Eye, however due to long queues and spontaneous developments of acrophobia, we instead opted for a cruise down the Thames to Tower Bridge. With our earlier failure still nagging at our egos, we decided to reattempt an excursion to Starbucks, which I am happy to report was successful.

So on it was to the evening venue, Bodeans. After being taken downstairs and presented with a massive two-course meal, courtesy of phpBB, a few of us even had space for pudding. Well fed, we took the opportunity to snap some group photos for the phpBB scrapbook. The night then ended for some, while pubs began for others.

Top: Bertie, of course. Left to Right: Raimon (Styles Team Leader), Derky (MOD Team), dellsystem (Website & Moderator Team), stickerboy (Ex-Styles & Moderator Team), nickvergessen (Development Team), ToonArmy (Development Team), Unknown Bliss (Website Team), Erik Frèrejean (Support Team), Paul (MOD Team) and Adrian (Community Member). Stickerboy’s girlfriend and noth (Community Member) also attended but do not appear in the above photo.

You can view more pictures here, here and here.

Last week, some six dozen people, invited guests, interested users, and team members gathered in New York City’s Times Square to talk phpBB.

I’ll steal one of Douglas’s moments of zen from his concluding talk. He posed the question Why are you here?, and received responses such as the following:
– To dedicate some time to working on phpBB
– To meet the people with whom I work on a daily basis
– To reconnect with the community after a lengthy absence
(The complete set will be available in a few days when video of the talks is published)

One of my favorite stories came from a gentleman whose name I’ve forgotten who had used phpBB several years ago. When he heard that phpBB was looking at Symfony2 for the backbone of phpBB4, he decided to check phpBB out again.

In other ways, a personal gathering is a nice way to make decisions. From my (development) point of view, it was great to review an old bug, write a patch, and get feedback from five people in five minutes. Other team members probably have other examples to share.

A fair majority of the time was spent in informal gathering, whether at the capstone social event at Thalia (the menu is definitely worth a try) or in the hotel conference room working on our own little projects.
In the end, we ended up with a better idea of what everyone else is working on, a better understanding of Symfony and Doctrine (with multiple talks devoted to them), and new ideas created during conversation.

I’d be remiss without sending a kudo to Marshalrusty (a.k.a Yuriy Rusko) for taking care of the preliminary setup and planning.