what do you guys think of phpbb3?

[ste]

will any of you guys be using olympus? its got tons of new features (well new for an offical phpbb release.) What do you think of the new default theme? http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.p...64&t=527019

[Anders Moen]

That's the new design for phpBB 3?Well, it looks ugly, but it's better than the standard designs like all forums have had before.In other words: I don't like it.

[ste]

That's the new design for phpBB 3?

yep and the new default theme prosilverthis version of phpbb is a long time coming & i think with it they may have finally caught up with vbulletin & ipb. which is cool because i remember when phpbb2 came out it was really advanced at the time. plus phpbb is free too. im gonna download a copy anyway and try it out, i may even use it for one of the forums i admin. after i create a style of course, im not mad about prosilver either

[Skemcin]

I always preferred phpBB. I like the new interface. The old standard silver blue was ok but was a tad on the bland side. That's not a bad thing, just wasn't enough to add to the experience of using the application.In any respect, I'm sure I'll have a job pretty soon where I'll end up using it.

[aspnetguy]

I prefer over the previous default themes. It is much better, although I always customize the themes anyway.

[Yahweh]

I like the default layout, it looks very nice.But from a programming point of view, I hate phpBB with a vengeance. Simply the worst board software I've ever used. In addition to the templating system being impossibly complex, the structure of the database tables being misengineered, the sql queries abusing the JOIN to no end, my worst pet peeve had to be the bbCodes.- The bbCode module is 600+ lines long, all of the bbCode regexes are handtyped. You can't simply call a function called bbCodeParser and have it produce a regex for you, you have to type it yourself. Because regexes are handtyped, there is no consistent format to bbCodes or bbCode processing; that problem is especially evident in the awkward inconsistencies in bbCode formats, such as {size=12} and {quote="username"} (notice the parameter for the QUOTE code must appear in quotation marks or the tag will not process, but the parameter in the SIZE tag must not appear in quotation marks or it will not process).- its nearly impossible to add a new bbCode. The process requires editing 6 different files, adding 50 lines of code, writing your own regex, and hoping everything went smoothly (which is usually not the case).- On top of that, the parser it suffers from a bug where it can't parse nested bbCodes properly.After I apologized to my site's contributors for the 50th time about the shoddy board software and being unable to fix it, I decided I had enough of phpBB and I wrote my own software. (I'm happy to say that in the board system I wrote,called yBoard, my yCode module is 40 lines long, yCodes can be created with a single line of code or by adding a single record to the database, and it handles nested codes the way it should.)

[aspnetguy]

I have never had trouble with phpBB in anyway. Then again, I have never modded the PHP code. I have only changed skins.Is this an issue because you made changes to the source or was this an issue out of the box? What version were you using?

[ste]

Hi Yahweh, your board software sounds interesting. apperently some of the issues you pointed out have been fixed in the new phpbb like the templating system which is supposed to be a brezze now as well as some other improvements.http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/im gonna download a copy anyway to try it out.are you planning on releasing yBoard at any stage?

[Yahweh]

I have never had trouble with phpBB in anyway. Then again, I have never modded the PHP code. I have only changed skins.Is this an issue because you made changes to the source or was this an issue out of the box? What version were you using?

Yes, I was trying to modify phpBB. I originally started using phpBB2 because it was free and popular, but the out-of-the-box version has a notorious reputation for security holes, so I followed the instructions on phpBBHacks.com to add a security mod. After my board was flooded with spam, I modified to add a CAPCHA, which elimiated 80% of the spam. Then I noticed the software is missing important features like a file upload, so I modified for that.I had 6 or 8 templates, which made it extremely difficult to update, because each template has to be modified seperately. Due to the difficulty of modifying phpBB, a mod was actually created specifically for the purpose of installing other mods... unfortunately, that auto-installer only works for the default phpBB template, and only works if the default template is unmodded. I eventually reduced down my templates to 1, just so I wouldn't have to spend hours and hours adding a single new mod to the software.Usually, I'm a huge advocate of the open source community, but only when the community can produce good software.

Hi Yahweh, your board software sounds interesting. apperently some of the issues you pointed out have been fixed in the new phpbb like the templating system which is supposed to be a brezze now as well as some other improvements.http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/im gonna download a copy anyway to try it out.are you planning on releasing yBoard at any stage?

No, my software isn't going to be released. It was written specifically for my site, not as an enterprise application.