phpBB Weekly

Session: phpBB Development Update & Roadmap by Nils Adermann and Chris Smith
Date/Time: Saturday 8/21 at 9:30-10:10 AM

This post contains my rough crib-notes from this presentation at Libertyvasion 2010. The post has not been proof-read for spelling, grammar, or accuracy.

Nils to talk about how phpBB development has changed over the past two years, and why these changes have been made.

In the past, phpBB development was a top-down process, decided by a few people with no outside input. This worked well in the beginning of phpBB when it was smaller, but as the project grew, it outgrew its development process. This caused development to dramatically slow down. Dev Team is now trying to encourage a more open, more democratic process, and get more people involved in development. While not everyone will want to join, Dev Team wants everyone to be represented in the dev process.

Steps that have been taken:
* Introducing Git (using GitHub) as version control for phpBB
* Area51 discussion forums now allow for more discussion of new features, the Request for Comments (RFC) process
* New bug tracker
* Bamboo = continuous integration platform (going to be using a lot more in the future)

Walking Through the Development Process
1) Someone (a user, MOD author, etc.) has an idea for a change or improvement or new feature
2) File a ticket on the tracker, which puts it on the radar for development (new tracker is an improvement for the Development Team, easier for them to better manage a larger number of tickets — Dev Team is going to try to improve it for the users side)
3) RFCs for discussion of these features — this is new to phpBB, process is still being worked out (i.e. the subsilver2 debacle)
By the way, subsilver2 will still be maintained going forward with a provided upgrade path, but will not be bundled with phpBB 3.1 anymore and will only be downloadable from the Styles DB.
The goal for RFCs is to reach a consensus for general acceptance of the change.
4) Patches — While RFCs are for bigger changes, all changes will need to have a patch. Patches can be written by anyone. Anyone can help implement new ideas in phpBB, which is great if Dev Team members don’t want to take time to implement a feature, but a member of the community wants to see it happen.
Even if the Dev Team members don’t think a feature is important, if the feature does well in the RFC process and a patch is submitted (and works), it will go into the phpBB software.
5) Merging — This is done by the Development Team, where patches & feature branches are merged into release branches. Using Git helps the Dev Team better manage this model of development.
6) Releasing — The Dev Team now uses feature freezes to expedite the development process.

This means that there will be more frequent releases, though they will have fewer features. However hopefully this will end the process of having many years between 3.x releases. The reason it’s been nearly three years since 3.0.0 is because the teams started to fall into the “practically rewriting the entire thing” trap that caught them during the 3.0 development process — last year they decided to scrap that completely and start over with a more realistic goal.

What’s Coming in 3.1 Ascraeus for Developers
Chris Smith presents this part.
* New Coding Guidelines! Classes will be phpbb_ prefixed. Not using eval() anywhere, which will not be permitted by MOD authors. Using newlines at the end of files. Bye bye closing ?&rt; PHP tag, which is not needed in straight-up PHP files.
* Hooks (to be described later today)
* New BBCode Engine, stack-based as opposed to a series of regular expressions. All core BBCodes will also be custom BBCodes.
* New Template Engine, implemented as a PHP string filter, dramatically improving memory consumption when compiling template files. Provides a nice performance improvement.
* Request Class which replaces the request_var() function. Use to retrieve the $_POST $_GET $_COOKIE superglobal values, since the superglobals themselves will be overwritten. Also compatibility for bridges & wrapping phpBB.
* Modular Cron allows the cron processes to be extendable by MOD authors. At the moment this is entirely community-developed, no developer has written code for this so far.

What’s Coming for phpBB Administrators
* Now supports SQLite 3 (thanks to dropping PHP4 support)
* Integrating AutoMOD directly into the core (more on that later today)
* Improved Team page (list of administrators & moderators), whereas this is static in 3.0.x, it will be admin-configurable in 3.1
* User Pruning — big improvement for pruning out lots of users, i.e. spambots

Coming for phpBB End-Users
* Gravatar support built-in (which is great for reducing avatar load on the admin’s server)
* Soft Delete, so that simply clicking Delete (by a moderator) will preserve posts in a hidden trash can
* Full timezone support (using PHP datetime functions), including automatic Daylight Savings Time transition
* Resume downloads of attachments (saving bandwidth for everyone)

This list is non-exhaustive, Nils recently blogged a more complete list of features coming in 3.1.