Phpbb3 debrief and a few other things.

Written by Brad

Thursday, 28 February 2008

Well, I don’t think anyone missed it, but in case you did, we have now successfully migrated the Joomla Community Forum from SMF to Phpbb3. All posts, all user accounts, everything. It’s been a huge job, and a special thanks must go out to all those who chipped in to help me. Thanks also to all of you for your patience. So, a few questions arise as a result:
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!
What has been done to Phpbb3 to make it suitable to our use?
Not much. We have had to convert a number of the larger frequently used database tables to INNODB. A few ‘tweaks’ have been made to Apache and Mysql, as well as APC for php caching. You may have noticed issues with the built in phpbb search not having an index of all the posts, however that has now been resolved with the installation of Sphinx. Special thanks to Nils from Phpbb who essentially coded this for us, but will also allow others sites to benefit from it in the future.
What about the future?
There is still much to be done with the current setup. There are a number of modifications we’d like to make, but for now, the forum is faster, searching is brilliant and moderating is so much better in Phpbb3. (BTW you can all help the moderators by using the ‘report this post’ icon found on all posts (*see icon below) to report any posts that break the forum rules and/or are posted in the wrong place etc. We really appreciate you help with this as it lightens the moderators load.) There will be UI/template changes in the future. As you’d expect we’d like to change all the official sites to a new fresh look, including the forum.

In other things.
A few weeks ago, while in Melbourne attending the JoomlaDay, one of the presentations caught my eye as something that may be especially useful to Joomla users in the future. You can see the Video Presentation here. This Extension for Joomla is also now available on the JED here. You will want to look deeper into the integration options, but essentially an excellent open source/GPL Shopping Cart is now able to be integrated with Joomla 1.5 and 1.0 pretty seamlessly.

Also…

I have it on good authority that out official Joomla Demo Site will be back soon. We’ll be sure to let you know about that when it happens.

Ok, that’s it until the S&I monthly report in a few days. Again, thanks to all users for their patience while we migrated the forum and ironed out the issues.

* Report post icon:

Read original post at source site... http://www.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,105/p,489/.

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