Tag: “phpBB 3” (Page 1 of 3)

Ubuntu 14.10 and phpBB 3.1.0 released

October 28, 2014 / David Yin / 0 Comments

Ubuntu is always a good desktop Linux distributation in the world. In the past years. more and more are installed as servers. Now I have four VPS are running under ubuntu, from 12.04 to 14.04.

Ubuntu 14.10 server is not a LTS edition. It will be supported in 9 months. Actually it will be upgrade to new version in 6 months.

Download Ubuntu 14.10 server here.

There is also a web forum programe has a new release. It is phpBB 3.1.0. The previous version of phpBB is 3.0.12, released on Sep 28, 2013, more than one year ago.

So I will take a trial installation on the new Ubuntu 14.10 Server. It is cool to have a test run on both new software.

PHP 5.5 vs PHP 5.4 vs PHP 5.3 – phpBB 3

September 3, 2013 / David Yin / 1 Comment

It is a test on a virtual box Centos 6.4 installation. One forum, powered by phpBB 3.0.11.
I would like to know the time to generate the page.
The time I got is through Firebug on Firefox.
On Firefox 23.0.1, Firebug 1.12.0, Net Panel > All
The waiting time 476ms is the time waiting for the response from web server.
From my point of view it is the time including generate the html.

Which program I tesed on?

phpBB 3.0.11, with file as acm_type. It is a forum viewing page, listing topics of one forum.

How to test PHP and get the results?

I tested seven times on each PHP version. Then took the highest one and lowest one away. Add the five waiting time figures and get the average of it.

Let us see the comparison:

How to Install a Mobile Style on phpBB 3

February 13, 2013 / David Yin / 0 Comments

It is based on phpBB 3.0.11. I checked the Google Analytics report. There are about 20% users using cellphone or iPad.
To accommodate these users, I installed a mobile style on it and added the Mobile device detection facilitate.

There are 4 steps to install it. Very easy.

Step 1
Download the Style package and unzip it.
Blue/Orange style
Unzip it and the folder structure looks like below.

Step 2
Upload all files unziped into the Styles folder on server.

How to upgrade php 5.2 to 5.3 on CentOS 5.8

October 26, 2012 / David Yin / 0 Comments

I have a forum running by phpBB 3. After upgrading to phpBB 3.0.10, the board notice said, from phpBB 3.1, the next version, it will not support php5.2.
phpBB 3.1 “Ascraeus” to require PHP 5.3.2
My server is running php 5.2.17 on CentOS 5.8. To prevent the future problem I decide to upgrade php version to 5.3 now.
I followed the instruction of Chris Jean to do the upgrade. But still some issue I fixed by myself. So I put the screen shoot below for reference.
Just briefly log the steps I did.
1) Remove php 5.2
2) Install php5.3, including php53, php53-bcmath, php53-cli, php53-common, php53-devel, php53-gd, php53-ldap, php53-mbstring, php53-mysql, php53-pdo
3) Manually install php53-mcrypt module

Check PHP version.

phpBB 3.0.11 released

August 27, 2012 / David Yin / 0 Comments

It is time to upgrade the forum powered by phpBB.
New maintenance version 3.0.11 released.
I have a small forum just upgraded from 3.0.10 to 3.0.11. It is easy to use Automatic Update Package.
There are tons of bugs and improvements made on phpBB 3.0.11.
And one new feature:
[PHPBB3-10616] – Add template inheritance by default
When I login as administrator into ACP, there is one warning shown as below:
The version of PHP on this server will no longer be supported by future versions of phpBB.
Click the details and find the answer.
phpBB 3.1 “Ascraeus” to require PHP 5.3.2

How to upgrade phpBB on 1and1

January 4, 2011 / David Yin / 0 Comments

In the end of last year, I helped a charity society upgrade their forum from phpBB2 to phpBB 3. They host their web site and phpBB forum on 1and1 Business hosting plan.
I did have much experience on upgrading, updating phpBB etc. The procedures of upgrade from phpBB 2 to phpBB 3 are posted here, part 1 , part 2.
The situation on 1and1 is a little bit complicated. I need a bridge server to complete the upgrade.
Let me put the whole story in short.

Zend Optimizer and Xcache make phpBB 3 faster

December 20, 2010 / David Yin / 0 Comments

I moved one phpBB forum to a VPS. All fresh.
I have Apache installed and MySQL. phpBB 3 relay on them.
Because of the size of forum, about 500K posts, 1000 users, the forum is not as fast as I think.
I have to do something to improve the performance of it. I still remember that some opcode optimizer can help.

Add Advanced BBcode Box 3 for phpBB 3

October 25, 2010 / David Yin / 0 Comments

I have a forum powered by phpBB3.0.7 PL1. It works great. Even I added so many mods and some my customized changes on it, it still has room to improve.

Last week, it took me about two hours to add Advanced BBcode Box 3.
You can find it and download it here.

After installation, the edit box looks like following:

Let me describe the steps I took to add it.

1) Backup, backup, backup.
The most important things before doing any major changes is BACKUP.
Backup all files under phpbb by command tar.
Backup mysql database, though command mysqldump. It is about 1GB big.

2) Ftp the backup file to other place for safe.

3) Download Advanced BBcode Box 3 package from the link above.

When phpBB 3.1 release

August 21, 2010 / David Yin / 0 Comments

Right now, latest version of phpBB is 3.0.7 PL1. The features of the next version 3.1 freeze on July 20, 2010. So what is the exact date to release it.
The following are features or changes on phpBB 3.1
Merged:
* Coding Guideline Modifications RFC Ticket
* Autoloading & Class Naming Convention RFC Ticket
* Removal of subsilver2 RFC Ticket
Patch in progress:
* Improved Page Titles RFC Ticket
* Avatar improvements, Gravatar RFC Ticket
* Improved template engine RFC Ticket
* SQLite 3.0+ Support RFC Ticket
* Updated BBcode engine RFC
* Request Class RFC Ticket
* Switch to PHP timezone handling RFC Ticket
* Modular Cron RFC Ticket
* General Hook Architecture RFC Ticket
* Resume support for attachments / HTTP range support RFC Ticket
* Soft Delete RFC Ticket
* Enhanced Team Page RFC Ticket
* Improve User Pruning feature RFC Ticket
* Rename MSNM to WLM RFC Ticket
* Link global announcements to forumsRFC Ticket
* Simple message API RFC Ticket
* Attachments Management RFC Ticket
* MOD Installer RFC Ticket
* Cleaning up the ACP UI RFC Ticket
* No db storage of themes and stylesheets RFC Ticket
RFC only:
* Migrations (UMIL) RFC Ticket Data Providers RFC
* Changing IP banning to use ‘longest prefix matching’ RFC Ticket
* Ability to delete auto login keys RFC Ticket
* Authentication Plugin Refactoring, User Integration & OpenID RFC Ticket
* Session Backend Abstraction (memcache support) RFC Ticket
* Search Backend Refactoring RFC Ticket
* Pre-Compile Template Includes RFC
* Overridable imageset and theme paths for CDNs RFC

How to upgrade phpBB 3.0.4 to phpBB3.0.5

June 15, 2009 / David Yin / 2 Comments

To upgrade phpBB properly without problem, I make a detailed upgrading plan. I would like to share it with you.
1. Disable forum board.
It is important to make the board clean. And keep resource usage low.
2. Backup
The most important part is backup.
2.1. Database backup
2.1.1. phpBB own tools
Admin Control Panel > Maintenance > Backup
Complete backup with gzip, including all tables, save and download.
(if your board has a lot of posts, the index table is very big. I prefer to clean the index first. Just like me, index table is about 200MB)
2.1.2. phpMyAdmin tool
Login your own phpMyAdmin web tool for MySQL database. Select your database and click Export all tables. My exported file is about 50MB.
2.2. Backup all phpBB 3.0.4 files.
SSH your host.

tar czvf forum.tar.gz ~/your.forum/

3. Download “Automatic Update Package”.
For upgrade, I like this package. It can merge your previous changes or mod on you old phpBB when doing upgrading.

cd ~/source/
wget the package.
tar xjf phpBB-3.0.4_to_3.0.5.tar.bz2
cp -r ./install/ ~/your.forum/

4. Upgrade
http://your.forum/install/
start upgrade following the upgrading wizard.
After it. Rename the install folder or delete it.
Enable the board.
Done.