You have no doubt noticed that this board has gone dormant. Most of that is my fault. I have not kept my promise of adding phpBB 3.1 MODs and updating previous phpBB3.0 hacks for InstallDD.

There is a reason, and it is called php-bbdr.

About a year ago, I had been looking at parts of WordPress for another project (BridgeDD), and I noticed that the WordPress plugin system was modular. I wondered to myself "What would happen if I put it in phpBB 3.0?".

So I tried it. And it worked.

After I completed design work for BridgeDD 1.3/2.0, I turned my attention back to this amazing discovery. I tried it with all sorts of things, from phpBB 3.0 MODs to phpBB 3.1 development extensions to some of my hacks.

Everything worked, it was memory-efficient, and it was rock-solid stable.

The stability and memory efficiency made sense...the WordPress plugin API has been around in its current incarnation for almost as long as phpBB 3.0 has been around. It has been used by thousands of developers and millions of users.

That got me wondering. Was I some sort of genius for coming up with the idea to put the WordPress plugin API into phpBB? Maybe. It was more likely, however, that someone on the phpBB dev team also thought of this and rejected it. But the more testing I did, the more I realized just how stable this system was. And it had more features than the phpBB 3.1 extensions system! For example, it is possible to set a priority when a plugin would be called during a hooked event.

Then it hit me: why not fork phpBB 3.0.x and create a new version of phpBB with the WordPress plugin API? That was too big a project for me to do alone, so I showed this to two people, and one of them was very interested in the project.

php-bbdr was born.

After six months of development, we are ready to have people try out our creation and provide feedback for its development. Since this is an alpha stage, we are not making the product publicly available; anyone who is interested in trying out php-bbdr should either send me a private message here, use the contact form to send me a message (include an email address!), or feel free to reply to this post.

Here is the test site: https://php-bbdr.com/forum/index.php

I look forward to hearing from you!

Whoa! congrats on this project. I thought I read you mentioning about forking phpbb3 probably on area51 or here even a long while back. This sounds exciting to me, more exciting news than when 3.1 came out. Add me to the list of testers!


By the way, something is up with the edit button.

Thanks for the bug report! The problem with the Edit button has been fixed.

I will contact you shortly regarding php-bbdr.

Great, thanks.

Not sure if I understood properly about your testing with MOD's and extensions, will php-bbdr support both?

When I said I tested MODs/extensions with the WordPress plugin API, I had rewritten the MOD/extension so it could be properly loaded. I tried this with two 3.1 extensions and three 3.0 MODs, and all worked flawlessly.

php-bbdr will not support phpBB 3.1 extensions; php-bbdr has its own plugin system that has more features and is much more memory-efficient. The core hook and template event locations/names in php-bbdr are almost identical to those in phpBB 3.1, which should make porting of extensions fairly easy. Those who have written 3.0 and 3.1 versions of their MOD/extension will have the easiest time since they will have all the code they need; it will be a matter of fitting the code into the php-bbdr plugin framework.

php-bbdr will support many (most?) phpBB 3.0.x MODs. An improved version of AutoMOD is built into php-bbdr as a plugin. We strongly suggest, however, that people use a plugin if one is available that meets their needs.

Is their a preview of php-bbdr some place to try out?

This is the test site: https://php-bbdr.com/forum/index.php

It will be open to everyone in the next few days.

Congratulations on this achievement, it sounds great. Are you going to release it for free, or will you charge money?

Since it's a fork of phpBB, it will retain the GPL2 license and will be free to all.

Nice to see an old face!

The php-bbdr forum is now open: https://php-bbdr.com/forum/index.php

You must become a member in order to download php-bbdr and the initial set of plugins that have been created. Both will become availble to everyone when php-bbdr enters official beta testing.

To get you interested, check out these numbers!

https://developers.google.com/speed/pag ... tab=mobile

I've been working with phpBB forums for many years. A common complaint from users has been its complexity. I applaud your efforts and hope you continue developing/refining this project. I'm loving the look and lightning fast speeds...

Regards,
Tahoebuff

I'm glad you like what you've seen thus far! The next few weeks should prove to be very interesting.

Late reply, but it looks great!

Nice project,and looks good.(I think i will give a try soon i will "fix" the"problem" with question LOL)
I try to register at: https://php-bbdr.com/forum/ucp.php?mode=register
but i dont understand what this means:
"php-bbdr uses _____ to add extra features" ?

I registered -- but I can't submit posts because I get this error:

Code: Select all

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x99\x8C' for column 'topic_last_post_subject' at row 1 [1366]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.

Regarding the emoji support topic:
Is there any way to get emoji support for a 3.0.14 board without having to install php-bbdr?

We're in the process of a significant update to the php-bbdr.com site (as well as to php-bbdr), and unfortunately you found a bug (actually a migration error). It's been fixed, and you'll be able to post with emojis in titles as well as in message bodies.

Full emoji support is very easy to add to phpBB 3.0.x under two conditions:

1) Your search engine is fulltext_native
2) searches on topic titles are exact (case-sensitive)

If you satisfy these two conditions, then some fairly simple changes to the schemas of the _forums, _topics, and _posts tables will add full emoji support.

The upcoming version of php-bbdr takes an alternative approach to emojis. It will have full emoji support with case-insensitive searches, and without the need to use costly extended-byte (utf8mb4) collation.

For basic emoji support in phpBB 3.0.x, you must change the collation of numerous table columns from its utf8 to the corresponding utf8mb4 collation, and change many of those columns from varchar(255) to varchar(512). Here is a fairly complete list of what must be changed:

Code: Select all

from utf8_bin to uft8mb4_bin
----------------------------
_drafts: draft_subject [varchar(512)], draft_message
_forums: forum_desc, forum_rules, forum_name [varchar(512)], forum_last_post_subject [varchar(512)]
_poll_options: poll_option_text
_posts: post_text
_privmsgs: message_subject [varchar(512)], message_text
_reports: report_text
_search_wordlist: word_text
_topics: topic_last_post_subject [varchar(512)], poll_title [varchar(512)]
_users: user_occ, user_interests

from utf8_unicode_ci to utf8mb4_unicode_ci
------------------------------------------
_posts: post_subject [varchar(512)]
_topics: topic_title [varchar(512)]

These changes will provide emoji support as well as retaining case-insensitive searches on topic titles.

Here's another way to add emoji support to phpBB 3.0.x:

t9151/emoji-support/