phpBB3?

[IBBoard]

The phpBB team have just released Beta1 of phpBB3. That means it's stable enough to give to the general public to test, but not stable enough for a 'live' environment. I'm still undecided, but I'm wondering whether to update to phpBB3 when they release it as either a Release Candidate (a 'we're almost sure its perfect' release) or the first full release.

Some of the improvements are quite major, and bring it much more on a level with Invision Board and vBulletin (only without the price tag!). The down sides are that all existing skins would need to be redone, and that any existing custom mods that haven't become a part of the vanilla forums will need re-writing and re-adding.

So, looking at the Non-exhaustive phpBB 3.0 Beta1 Feature List and the official dev board, what do people think? Would it be worth it? Is there anything promising in there that you like the look of?

[fneep]

phpBB3 is looking great. I would love to test the new features. Upgrade!

[IBBoard]

You can sign up to their Dev board to test the new features, if you're that desperate Chances are I will upgrade, because phpBB2 will probably be left behind and won't be the main focus of patches and new mods etc, but it might take a while for me to upgrade because of the mods and skins.

[Kokuten]

Damn, thats alot of features, it would be pretty cool to try out something thats different from the everyday forum.

[IBBoard]

This forums already is - see posts 1, 5 and 6 of our Forum MODs thread. The thread doesn't mention the modified User Control Panel either

The phpBB3 list is quite extensive, though, even if it isn't all of the features and even if some of them are fairly mundane (min/max password lengths)

[IBBoard]

phpBB3 Beta 4 came out about a month ago now, with Beta 3 two weeks before that and Beta 2 a whole three months before that!

I wonder how many more betas they'll have. Not that you can ever guarantee, but maybe one or two more and then we'll make it to a release candidate that may be installed here

[IBBoard]

It was a couple of weeks ago now, but phpBB3 Beta5 has been released. They're hoping the next release will be a full Release Candidate (the "we think it's bug free now" release) so the site might be updated fairly soon...

...once they release it, I hack some mods in, convert the skins over, and get a chance to do it all!

[IBBoard]

phpBB have released a quick announcement about Release Candidate 1. Apparently it's nearly there and will be fully supported. Once it's released I'll install a local copy and see about transferring things like skins to the new board and also see what mods need migrating.

[IBBoard]

phpBB3 RC 1 has now been been released. Although it's still only a release candidate, I'll be installing it on my development machine, investigating the complexity of migration and moving the skins over to it shortly.

[edit] Installation and conversion was relatively swift and painless. Just about all of the data seems to have been migrated properly on my development machine.

I'm not so keen on the new style, but then I never am.

A good number of our installed mods look like they might not be necessary, although I'm sure there's one or two I'll need to hack in The posting page is certainly a lot more powerful now, so it's all going to need a good bit of style work to get our current styles migrated.

[IBBoard]

Work on re-skinning phpBB3 is coming along well now. Most of the styling except the Moderators Control Panel is now complete, I just need to check a few things with the migration, thoroughly check that there aren't any styling bugs, check and fix all of the screw-ups that MSIE is bound to make, and see if I can find one or two final Mods (or quickly code them myself).

[IBBoard]

Everything is now modded into the new forum, including a Multi-race rank mod that I wrote myself. It still needs testing in IE, and I need one quick test run to make sure that the rank set migration works correctly, but I'm hoping I'll have plenty of time to migrate the forums over during next week (which I have off as holiday)

[IBBoard]

I'll be emailing this out in a minute and closing the board shortly after, but I'm about to shut down the forums and upgrade to phpBB3.

phpBB3 is currently on RC2, but it seems stable enough and I've re-worked the texture and include the most important mods.

There are still one or two issues with IE where it doesn't look quite as neat as it could, or where I can't work out why it hides content, but I'll sort them out once it's up. None of it is majorly important - forums and topics still work fine in IE, albeit without the fancy effects - so nothing should be lost.