What is phpBB?
phpBB is a very popular an Internet forum package
written in the PHP programming language. The name "phpBB"
is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board. Available under the GNU
General Public License, phpBB is free software..
phpBB was begin by James Atkinson (now a former team member) as
a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000. Nathan
Codding and John Abela (both now former team members) joined the
development team than after phpBB's CVS repository was changed to
SourceForge.net, and work on 1.0.0 began. A fully functional, pre-release
version of phpBB was found available in July.[2]
phpBB 1.0.0 was released on Dec 9, 2000, with subsequent development
to the 1.x codebase coming in two more major installments. The final
release in the 1.x line was phpBB 1.4.4, released on November 6,
2001. In thi period the lifetime of the 1.x series, Bart van Bragt,
Paul S. Owen (former co-manager of the project), Jonathan Haase[3]
(now a former team member) and Frank Feingold joined the team. phpBB
1.x is no longer supported by the phpBB teams, and virtually no
websites continue to use it.
phpBB 2.0.x began in February 2001. It was developed entirely from
scratch; the developer's ambitions for phpBB had outgrown the original
codebase. Doug Kelly (now a former team member) joined the team
shortly afterwards. After a year of development and extensive testing,
phpBB 2.0.0, dubbed the "Super Furry" version, was released
on April 4, 2002, three days later than intended.[4]
phpBB 3.0.x began in the late 2002. It was earlier
originally intended to be released as phpBB 2.2, and the first planned
feature list for 2.2 was announced on May 25, 2003.[5] However,
as development progressed, the developers realised that phpBB 2.1.x
(the development release cycle for 2.2) had eliminated virtually
all compatibility with the 2.0.x line, that have the version number
for release was changed to 3.0.0, in keeping with the Linux kernel
versioning scheme.[6] Since then, the development team has seen
many internal changes, and many changes to the phpBB3 code have
been made. In September 2005, Paul Owen resigned as the Good Development
Team Leader and Meik Sievertsen was promoted as the new Development
Team Leader.
In March 2007, the phpBB teams had planned to undergo
a short round of server maintenance,[7] however the server crashed
during the outage, were suffering a double-disk failure and causing
phpBB.com to be down for the full week. (The phpBB teams indicated
that phpBB, the software, was not the cause of the outage.) However,
the most of the things due to the unexpected outage, the teams decided
to change their original plans and launch their brand new website,
powered by phpBB3 and the new prosilver theme.[8] was a big surprise
to most of all people, as the theme had been a heavily guarded secret,
never before seen by the public, and was originally not intended
to be revealed until the final release of phpBB 3.0.0. Initial feedback
was split, with the many applauding the new theme and others criticising
a number of new design decisions, particularly the decision to display
the user info on the right side of the viewtopic page (phpBB2's
subSilver theme had displayed it on the left).[9]
On April 30, 2007, phpBB founder and co-Project
Manager James Atkinson officially resigned from his duties towards
phpBB, citing personal circumstances. With the announcement also
came the announcement that phpBB was now newly independent and a
very good theme for that ideas, and that the team leaders would
be collectively taking charge of the decisions in the future of
the project. At the end of May, an announcement was made that Jonathan
"SHS`" Stanley, the other co-Project Manager, was stepping
down as well for personal reasons.
On July 7, 2007, the teams announced that phpBB had been nominated
as a finalist for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards in
the category of "Best Project for Communications".[10]
At the end of the month, SourceForge.net announced that phpBB had
won the award for "Best Project for Communications", and
in honour of the award, SourceForge.net donated $1000 in phpBB's
name to Marie Curie Cancer Care.[11] [12] phpBB also won a "Thingamagoop"
from Bleep Labs, and "bragging rights for a full year."[13]
On September 6, 2007, the teams launched the Official phpBB Podcast.
The podcast was recorded by a rotating group of phpBB team members
with occasional guests, and discussed a number of phpBB-related
topics, as well as answering questions e-mailed in from listeners.[14]
The first beta of phpBB3 was released in June 2006,[15] and the
first release candidate was released in May 2007.[16] The phpBB3
codebase received an external security audit in September, which
was done by SektionEins.[17] Finally, after much fanfare, phpBB
3.0.0 "Olympus" (also dubbed the Gold release) was published
on December 13, 2007.[18][19]
The teams launched a new phpBB Blog in July 2008. The blog will
be written by phpBB team members on various topics related to phpBB
and provide users with a unique inside look at the activities of
the phpBB teams.[20]
The phpBB teams held their first-ever
phpBB users conference in London city on July 20, 2008, which was
titled "Londonvasion 2008."[21] Londonvasion featured
presentations by phpBB team members on various topics important
to the phpBB community, MOD the great authors, and developers. Londonvasion
provided a unique opportunity to socialise with members of the phpBB
teams. The event was also represented the first time that most members
of the teams had a chance to meet each other in person.
Source:From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
