After 6+ Years

Meliodas

After 6 years PHPBB has released their new update codenamed Ascraeus ( https://www.phpbb.com/about/launch/ ). With all the new apps like NodeBB, Discourse and Vanilla (not that new), guess PHPBB felt the need to get back in on development. The forum has been completely rewritten, in fact none of the old plugins work any more and they have embarked on a course to release official plugins to go with the new Ascraeus release.

And I was thinking, since majority of bulletin board share goes to PHPBB ( second to VBulletin), are they trying to prevent current forums running PHPBB to prevent migrating to newer alternatives??
For example, there are forums with 1-2 million members active members like Gaia Online which makes use of PHPBB 3.0 even to this date What ya think?

julian

Not sure why you deleted your post @vegetagz6, it was quite interesting

Meliodas

@julian restored I thought people wouldn't be interested. So you checked their new release?

julian

It's nice to see phpBB catching up to the new boards (NodeBB incl.). They make some bold claims, of course, which I find worrying.

There was the line saying phpBB had 0 vulnerabilities disclosed in the past 4 years, but then 6 days ago they released 3.1.1, a security update. Interesting.

Meliodas

Ya even more sad is that, their new release is a complete rebuild that none of their current plugins nor themes will work properly. It is more like going back to square one. Even established PHPBB communities cannot update due to this.

a_5mith

Symfony Components

NOPE. GTFO.

Still looks poor.

Meliodas

Yup, in terms of looks, I can only think of 2 other forum apps other than NBB, namely discourse and vanilla.But a forum need not always be about looks, Some of the heavily popular forums still use, normal vbulletin (may be due to investment) phpbb and all. functionality, ease of use and familiarity comes first. Remember Facebook in its early days?

esiao

@vegetagz6 You can add esoTalk and the new comer Flarum but it's PHP.

Meliodas

No, Flatrum is Ember.js. I don't know about Esotalk, but its development is retarded these days. Also Flatrum will debut next year only. So long way to go for it.

esiao

@vegetagz6 Yes but PHP too with Lavarel framework that will be used for the API.
esoTalk is Flarums ancestor it's development is stopped for Flarum to grow.
I'm curious to see what they'll manage to create.

Meliodas

Ohh that's good news, because I am used to php that it is really hard for me to make any serious changes in NBB, so I will have to take some time before I can try nbb. Vanilla and I guess Flatrum also, will be easier to modify. NBB has a learning curve.

esiao

@vegetagz6 Well I never developed in NodeJS before NodeBB and in 1 month I've done my first plugin, the learning curve is not so intensive because NodeJS is quite logic and simple in the approach, where PHP can be a real pain for new developers.

Meliodas

Now that's good news for me. Out of curiosity, which is your plugin?

a_5mith

@vegetagz6 said:

Remember Facebook in its early days?

It was awful then, and it's awful now. But that's probably just down to the people that I know.

esiao

@vegetagz6 The first one was nodebb-plugin-topic-color https://community.nodebb.org/topic/1878/topic-color
The second one nodebb-plugin-custom-header https://community.nodebb.org/topic/2333/custom-header
And now I have a theme in the pipes after doing my forum forum.galaxygraph.fr And I think it was done in 3 months or so. So yeah NodeBB is definitely customizable and easy to learn (not at @Schamper level tho)

Meliodas

Your theme is really good. Will you be making it open source. I know they are simple modifications to the base theme, but its good enough to be uploaded to github or npm repository. Nice, infact awesome work.

esiao

@vegetagz6 As stated here https://community.nodebb.org/topic/3219/nodebb-theme-concept-minimalism-name-to-change/ I won't release the theme used by my forum. But I may share some tips and tricks and portions of code if some ask me.

Meliodas

@a_5mith It does not matter whether FB is awful or good. A fair amount of people really dislike FB, a bigger portion especially students make use of it like a daily part of their life. The point is they are the second most popular site in the internet. So logically their operation model is successful one.

Meliodas

@esiao to start with, you can share,if u do not mind, how to invert the position of notifications bar from top to left side. Lol I really like left side notification bar. By the way minimalism theme is also good.

psychobunny

@vegetagz6 said:

For example, there are forums with 1-2 million members active members like Gaia Online which makes use of PHPBB 3.0 even to this date What ya think?

It took many forums years to move from 2.x to 3.x because none of the mods or themes were compatible. Now that they're starting from scratch again I would imagine most boards that are a heavily modified (such as GO) won't be making the 3.x to 3.1 switch anytime soon