Re: [libreoffice-website] Evaluation of phpbb

Sounds like phpBB is not going to work.
For my hosting company, they include 3 forum options:
phpBB, SMF[Simple Machines Forum], and Vanilla Forum.

I will talk to people I know who have used forums and see which ones are 
the best for them.


On 11/28/2011 09:39 AM, Alexander Werner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as it was decided to also provide forums, I installed a test instance of
> phpbb on saturday during my spare time at Linuxday in Dornbirn. It is
> currently available at http://forum-test.libreoffice.org (this URL is
> probably going to change to http://forum-test.libreoffice.org/phpbb if
> other forums are also evaluated).
> Everyone feel free to register and test, if you want additional rights
> please ping me.
>
> During installation I encountered some quite troubling issues, most of
> them of purely technical nature.
> Let me first describe the setup:
> - I used postgresql instead of mysql as database backend because of
> speed, transaction safety, scalability, and various other reasons. (I
> see postgresql as a must-have for any forum software we might use)
> - During setup, I set the table prefix from "phpbb_" to "". (Bad mistake)
>
> After the initial setup, which worked quite well, I tried to install
> some plugins ("MODs" in phpbb-language). But I was confronted with the
> fact that there is no default way of installing these. The first thing I
> found out was that there is a special xml-based format used to
> distribute mods. After more searching, I figured out that I needed to
> install the Automod-Mod to install Mods. As there seems to be no
> official documentation for AutoMod, I read some tutorials in the forums
> and got to install AutoMod. As the installation procedure includes an
> install directory and phpbb refuses to run if such a directory exists,
> the forums are offline during the installation. This is not su much of a
> problem if you are installing from scratch. But when doing updates in a
> live forum this is very annoying for the users. Also there is no update
> notification or automatic update process for AutoMod as it seems, so
> admins have to watch the AutoMod website closely for security patches.
>
> Now I wanted to install the phpBB OpenID MOD. This mod is not included
> in the official mod-database but hosted on a third party site.
> Installation directly by URL is not possible, the MOD must be downloaded
> and uploaded via the AutoMOD webinterface. After uploading the MOD and
> starting the installation procedure, an xsl-translated xml file was
> presented to me. This file showed everything that the AutoMOD installer
> had done to the phpbb installation. And what I saw was quite shocking
> (this is not only true for the above mentioned MOD, but also for many
> others in the official database):
> The MOD patches phpbb vanilla files. Not only php files, but also the
> included templates. This is NOT GOOD. Why you may ask?
> - Updating the phpbb-core may break MODs
> - MODs can break each other (the installation order of independent MODs
> may even be important!)
> - You can't simply copy and adopt the theme, as the vanilla themes are
> patched to include additional features
> - Updating MODs means removing the patches and reapplying the new patch.
> This can go terribly wrong in so many ways!
>
> *Every* other serious web application handles
> plugins/mods/modules/whatever by separating them into their own directory.
>
> Okay, after successfully installing and configuring the OpenID MOD, I
> saw that the theme the MOD was made for was a bit broken (nothing you
> couldn't fix with some css). But the MOD didn't work at all. Reasons for
> this seemed to be me chossing to have no table prefix (The table prefix
> is hardcoded in many MODs) and choosing postgresql (MODs mostly only
> support mysql).
>
> The next thing I tried was getting postgresql native fulltext search
> working, as most application implementations of fulltext indexing result
> in huge (and later d*** slow) indexes. MySQL indexing never was a choice
> because the tradeoff would have been losing transactions.
>
> Gladly, I found a quite simple "extension" (I wouldn't call it MOD as no
> patching and other horrible stuff involved ;) ) in a forum thread[1]
> that promised to allow postgresql full text search. Unfortunately, I had
> to use the original extension, replace one file with the one appended to
> forum thread page three and merge changes made in a github repo and
> those on page 4. (Sounds fun, doesn't it?)
> Now I reindexed everything and... Search worked, except for the fact
> that every search term was ignored because it was to common.
> Btw: Drew, was it you posting in this thread? Did it finally work for you?
>
> Now I tried to change the theme to make it look a bit more LibO-ish.
> Unfortunately, theme editing seems to only work reliably using editor of
> the ACP (AdminControlPanel). Editing the files on filesystem level was
> ignored, even after emptying all caches and restarting the webserver.
>
> This are my experiences with phpBB for the moment, some more thoughts:
> - There are always SIDs in the URL. This is potentially dangerous
> (session fixation attacks, session leaking)
> - SEO friendly URLs need a PreMOD on a vanilla phpBB installation[2],
> seems to be awful lot of work
> - Updates are lot of work (core->seo->automod->all other mods)
> - No update notifications
>
> So it seems to me as phpbb is _very_ time consuming to administer, but
> please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> Cu,
> Alex
>
>
> [1]: http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=28707
> [2]: http://www.phpbb-seo.com/en/seo-phpbb/


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