phpBBex is an enhanced version of phpBB 3

phpBB 3 is a popular free forum. The first version was released in 2000, and since then a huge community has formed around this engine. Without looking at the serious architectural flaws of the third branch, which are inherited from previous versions, this engine is considered to be one of the most powerful solutions among free forums. A huge number of mods written by the community, only contribute to this.
As a rule, very few people are satisfied with the standard phpBB 3 functionality, and each forum owner installs several mods, or uses ready-made assemblies that include the most popular modifications. However, not all modes are implemented well enough. Something was written for the old versions of the forum, and was not updated, which is why some problems arise in the new versions of the forum.
A few years ago I created a fork with the name phpBBex for my hometown forum , where I tried to make phpBB 3 the way I see it. Most of the changes done do not exist as mods. Almost all the installed mods were heavily reworked: bugs were fixed, the code was adapted to the latest phpBB versions. Recently, the project was transferred to Mercurial, with the result that fork support has become much simpler. I hope that someone will find this project useful.

What changed?

There are a lot of changes. Most of them are just nice little things. Let us dwell on this in a bit more detail. As a demo, I will use the site of the city of Slutsk (login: tester, password: tester), which differs from phpBBex only by the added gallery and chat. See for comparison on the work of the original phpBB 3, please visit try-phpbb.com .

Home page

• PhpBBex uses modified prosilver in a new color scheme.
• The top row of links can be edited from the admin panel. Links to the gallery and chat that are not in phpBBex itself are added on this site (since phpBBex is only a forum)
• New compact header with drop-down menu for quick access to all pages, including control panels for administrators and moderators
• Free space left for the banner :)
• Important announcements are displayed.
• The topic name is displayed with the last message.
• Text copyright notice can be edited from the admin panel
• In Runet, the liveinternet.ru counter is most often used, so it is embedded in the template. Can be deleted. Since the server liveinternet.ru does not always respond quickly, the counter code is inserted with a slight delay so that the browser does not disturb the user with the “download” indicator

View topic

• The site path is displayed under the heading only when it is needed (on the pages of forums and topics)
• Noticeable action buttons on the topic, located next to the title (in phpBB 3, for some reason, developers limited themselves to obscure links at the bottom of the page)
• A separate button for closing and opening a topic.
• Social network buttons (can be removed)
• Updated mini-profile: age and gender are displayed, the number of messages and registration date are hidden
• The name of the forum, its description and rules before the quick response form
• Powerful quick response (reworked mod from rxu)
• All response options are available (configurable)
• To cite, just select a piece of the message and click the “Quote” button - the selected text will automatically be placed in the quick response form

Topic creation

• The interface of the form has been completely redesigned, now the additional features are more understandable to the unprepared user.
• The name of the forum, its description and rules are displayed so that the user knows where he creates the topic.
• When you enter a question for a poll, the poll controls automatically appear.
• Supported update downloaded files
• You can pin the first message on all pages of the topic.

View Profile

• The order of blocks has been changed to more fully utilize the space on the page.
• If the user has enough rights, the contact details are displayed explicitly so that they can be copied.
• The administrator displays the User-Agent and the last IP address of the user.
• A Skype field has been added, a click to dialog opens in Skype
• Fields AIM, YIM and MSN were hidden because they are not very popular in the CIS
• Added field field that appears next to the username as an icon

Notifications

The notification of a private message is now opened not in a separate pop-up window (which is usually blocked by the browser), but on the same page where the user is located.

BBCode processing

Files embedded in messages do not carry the string, which positively affects the convenience of formatting the message.
')

After the bb codes [code], [quote] and [list], no empty line is inserted. Visually, the topics will seem somewhat shorter :)

Open polls

Optionally, users can create open polls that show who voted and how.

Performing multiple confirmation transactions

phpBB 3 does not allow for multiple confirmation pages at a time. If you, for example, want to delete several messages in a topic, open the corresponding “Delete” links in the new windows, and then confirm your actions in turn, only the last called action will be executed correctly, and the rest will cause an error. Agree, a very unpleasant phenomenon.
For security reasons, phpBB 3 requires that a confirmation page be called up for each confirmation action. That is, deleting a message by passing all parameters to the script without calling up the confirmation page will no longer work. For each confirmation, a unique confirmation key, confirm_key, is generated, which is checked during the execution of the action itself. If confirm_key is missing or does not match, the action is rejected. The whole problem is that only one confirm_key value is saved for each user. That is, when opening a new confirmation page, the old confirmation key is simply replaced by a new one.
From time to time, different users wrote about this problem in the phpBB 3 bugtracker, but the developers of the latter believe that this is a useful feature. Somewhere I've heard it already :) In phpBBex, the problem is solved simply - the system saves as many as you want to confirm_key and stores them for 15 minutes.

Warning system

The administration can issue three types of warnings: a remark, a warning and a ban. Each warning is tied to a specific message and has a time limit (except for comments). Warnings and bans are displayed in the mini profile in the form of yellow and red cards. At the moment, all these cards are for informational purposes only. That is, if you issue a red card (ban), the punishment for the user must be separately applied using standard forum tools. In the next versions, special groups will be created in which the system will place the user with a certain number of warnings or with a bath, and for these groups limited rights will be set.

Custom settings

• Disable topic review on the full answer page
• Set the number of topics and the number of messages per page (from 10 to 100)
• New date formats specific to the CIS
• Enable and disable quick response and quick topics

Admin Settings

• Automatic limit on the number of lines, images and links in the signature
• The right to ignore the message editing time limit
• Setting site keywords (meta keywords)
• Editing of external links and copyright notices
• Prevent user from changing style, time zone, language
• Automatic gluing of consecutive messages from one user

Other

• In the RSS, if there is no topic, the comment contains the topic of the entire thread.
• Russian URLs are displayed in decoded form (for example, “% D0% 9D% D0% BE% D0% B3% D0% B0” will be displayed as “Leg”)
• Added Russian bots
• Added page "Forum Rules" (so far only Russian version), facilitated FAQ
• When registering, you can specify a user name containing only letters, numbers, a space, a period, a hyphen, or an underscore
• The comments do not have a default topic.
• Htaccess configures caching of images, styles, etc.
• Global ads are displayed on the main page and tied to a specific forum, as well as regular ads (solves a lot of problems, for example, with the path through the site)
• User list filters (active, not active, all, no messages)
• Counting the number of topics created by users
• Login by username or email
• The number of user created threads is being counted.
• The official Support Toolkit is enabled (available at / stk /)
• Updated phpBB 2 emoticon set, added pictures for titles

Restrictions

Since resources for development and testing are very limited, phpBBex is limited to support for Russian and English, MySQL database and updated prosilver style.

Installation and Conversion

The installation process does not differ from phpBB 3. Conversion of an already installed phpBB 3 to phpBBex is also supported. To do this, you need to run the install / phpbbex.sql script on the database updated to phpBB 3.0.9.
You can download the latest version of the project at phpbbex.googlecode.com .

Join the project!

If you like the direction of the work done, you can create a clone of the Mercurial repository, and start making some changes of your own. If you have never worked with Mercurial, I recommend reading the Hg Init article. Most likely, when you start using Mercurial, you, like me, will not understand how you lived without it before :)

ToDo

• Automatic change of the main group for the user according to the specified rules, taking into account the number of warnings, the presence of a "ban" (red card), the number of topics and messages
• The right to use HTML in the comments (for the administrator and, for example, for the robot that creates forum topics for each blog entry)
• Use splash instead of popup windows.
• Shorten the texts of the notifications so that when notifying by Jabber very long messages do not arrive
• Automatic counting of message counters and topics
• Automatic deletion of users with 0 messages that have not visited the forum for a certain time (optional)
• Concealment of some sections from RSS
• More up-to-date information in logs (texts of deleted messages, etc.)
• Deferred actions (the topic will be deleted after 24 hours, the topic will be moved after 2 hours, etc.)
• Actively use AJAX where it will increase user convenience.

Thanks for attention. I will be glad to read your comments and suggestions!