Alex S. wrote to us and and recommended that everyone take a look at MyBB, a Web forum application.

I noticed MyBB isn't on your CMS Focus list.  I would recommend you looking into it as it is an amazing system.  It even just went open source recently.

But, don't take my word for it KDE is now using it them selves.  It's new compared to SMF and phpBB but it's already competing with the best (including IPB and vB).

http://mybboard.net/

I'm not a developer or anything.  Just recommend this amazing forum system with a bright future.

While I make no promises on getting MyBB into CMS Focus, I do think it is time to take a new look at SMF, phpBB, vB, and the new comers.  Perhaps in a couple days we'll see if it is time for another forum application to knock SMF off the top 30 CMS list.  May the best forum software win...

I know I'm a week behind about this, but I just came across the link via Gadgetopia:  Open-source PHP applications that changed the world.  The CMS related applications that were determined world changers are listed below.

• PHP-Nuke - 1999
• eZ Publish - 2000
• osCommerce - 2000
• phpBB - 2000
• Gallery - 2001
• Drupal - 2001
• MediaWiki - 2002
• WordPress - 2003
• Joomla! - 2005
• Magento eCommerce - 2007

When you split the list into three sections, you get the feeling that PHP-Nuke, ezPublish, and osCommerce have been around for a very long time.  More importantly, you begin to think that it is time for Gallery, Drupal, and MediaWiki to either be seen as mature applications or for those applications to finally grow up.

The Joomla! community just completed migrating their forum from SMF over to phpBB3. Brad Baker posted some of the details on Joomla.org's use of phpBB3 for their forum. In part, some of the move to phpBB stemmed from Joomla.org's discomfort from bridging GPL applications with non-GPL applications. Baker answers the question in his own way.

Why did we move to phpBB3?
Good question, and there is a simple answer. Whilst SMF was great for us, it is not licensed under GPL, and as a result many of our users who like to follow the choices we make were going to run in to integration issues in the future. As well as that, the team at phpBB have been great, with many of them offering to help, especially with the conversion.
In any case, we’re not going back, and the future is phpBB3!

Beyond a few minor tweaks, it looks as if Joomla.org was able to convert SMF over to phpBB with very few issues. Considering the Joomla community forum usually has hundreds of users on line at the same time, this is no small move for a forum to make the switch to new software. Congratulations to Joomla!

Once again, another open source project has dropped Concurrent Versions System (CVS) for Subversion (SVN). Both CVS and SVN are open source version control systems used mainly by developers involved in various software projects. This time the project is phpBB, a forum application.

We like to announce the switch from CVS to SVN for our repository management and source control. Within this step, we also set up a new home for phpBB development and phpBB related projects. At the moment only phpBB itself is listed and only repository management handled there. Within the next months we will enable more and more features and move internal projects as well as hopefully other public projects to the new home. [Link]

Although I'm not much of a developer, I've been interested for some time in why a project has picked one version control system over another. In part this is because I recognize revision control is something my own employer need to do better, not just for the larger projects but even the "local" non-enterprise projects I often found myself involved in.

Thanks to a post at OpenSourceCommunity.org, I came across a conversion tool to allow you to import the SMF 1.1 database into a phpBB 3 site. Information about the conversion tool can be found in a forum post at phpbb.com. By the way, the script is still in beta, meaning that it works but you might find some bugs since it is not fully tested.

It is not that I'm encouraging anyone to convert their site from SMF to phpBB, but it is very nice to have options such as these available. In fact if anyone can point me to a good conversion tool for migrating a phpBB database to SMF, I would welcome the information.

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice. In places the article compares vBulletin to Drupal, this is the platform The Webmaster Forums will be switching to and represents many of the things vBulletin should—in our humble opinion—aspire to.

Now this was a interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

• Attachments - Attachments in posts and Personal Mail, Automatic image thumbnails,Display attachments inline
• Unlimited Subforums - Create unlimited subforums, Display active topics of all subforums
• Custom BBCodes - Create your own BBCodes, Add buttons to posting screen
• Custom Profile Fields - Add new fields on user profiles, Display them at registration, Display them on the profile view

After a long time of downtime we are proud to say to be back online. Due to the events we decided to give [up] our previous plans and work a good push and put the new website up instead of reviving the old one. Within this step we also updated the main forums to phpBB3 Olympus as well as using the new phpBB default style, named prosilver.

There are still some features which need to be implemented, as well as ongoing work on the documentation and of course phpBB3 itself - but we are getting to it. If you see any glitches or bugs please do not hestitate to report them through our bug tracker.

As the server needs to be rebuilt with a new set of harddisks and reconfigured, there will be a number of days of downtime whilst this holding page is up on a vserver and that the server failure can be recovered from with the existing phpBB.com website and data from our private CVS repositories restored. In the mean time, please direct yourself to our temporary support forums over at Area51.

Beta 4 for phpBB 3.0 has been released. This time around users of the forum application will find that it also contains something new, an update path.

With this beta an update path is provided, though being not fully supported. We decided to give away the proposed update package to let it properly test and fix any remaining issues encountered before using this as the primary method of updating. This means that you should test the update and report any bugs or issues you notice, but not depend on a successful update - you should still not use this beta in a live environment and you should always be able to completely remove your installation to perform a fresh install.

The current update package, from what I can tell, currently only provides an update from phpBB 3.0 Beta 3 to Beta 4.

The original announcement at phpBB.com comes in two versions; the first posted on the phpBB.com forum and the second posted in the phpBB.com development pages . Downloads are available on the second link.

"We are pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB3 Beta3 package. With this third beta release we are again a great step forward. With this beta no update path is provided due to a number of extensive database schema changes and us having decided to implement full UTF-8 capability. But what we did is implementing the first steps to provide you with an automatic update tool which should lay the ground for providing updates later."

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