In contrast to March, April started out busy and ended up slower. This is in part because much of my March work continued into April. Anyhow, here’s what I worked on for clients in April. As always, I do not identify my clients by name or domain unless they specifically allow it:
- I spent a lot of time continuing work for a client I started working for in March. Their WordPress site integrates phpBB into a separate area.
- First I completed the move of the forum from phpBB 3.0 to 3.2. The hard part here was making changes to the phpBB style to integrate the overlaying WordPress theme in the headers and footers, as there were many CSS class and HTML ID conflicts.
- As part of the upgrade, the client took the plunge and moved the site from standalone web pages to WordPress. A lot of scripts written by someone else to monetize particular types of posts broke because of changes to phpBB’s API. These old programs were “tightly coupled”, to use a software engineering term. Basically as these broke I fixed them by updating the phpBB code inside these programs. Most of this work involved changing $_SERVER, $_GET and $_POST statements to use phpBB’s request object instead.
- With the new WordPress framework, some of the old content appearing in sidebars needed to move into WordPress widgets in the sidebars of the theme. We’re taking this piecemeal, learning as we go along. A better “loosely coupled” way to get phpBB content in WordPress is to use phpBB feeds. phpBB comes with a built in Atom feed that needs to only be enabled. But it doesn’t do everything to retrieve relevant posts. WordPress has a feed widget and there are also a number of other widgets available as plugins that do a fancier job of serving feed content from Atom or RSS feeds inside of WordPress. In the case of my client, the sidebar needed to show recently posted topics in the forum. I eventually decided I needed something beyond phpBB’s Atom feed, so I chose my own Smartfeed extension instead. However, it didn’t return quite what the client wanted as he only wanted “fresh” topics from a certain forum, and only the latest post from these topics. I was able to tweak my Smartfeed extension to do this, and this inspired me to work on a new release of Smartfeed to add these features. Once deployed, I will update the version of Smartfeed I installed for this client to use it instead.
- I fixed an issue with moderator permissions with the forum by adding these moderators to a list of global moderators.
- Installed a SiteMap extension so posts were better available to search engines.
- Upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.2.0 to phpBB 3.2.2. Replaced the logo in the original dimensions. Upgraded Cleantalk to latest version on GitHub. Enabled the spam firewall feature of Cleantalk. Installed announcement on index extension for 3.2 (not official). Fixed issue with wrong reCaptcha. Checked global moderator privileges and they were okay. Administrator moderator role was changed to Full Moderator.
- Upgraded Tapatalk extension to version 2.0.8. This also meant removing the mobique directory and reuploading that.
- Changed the people who have moderator privileges for a client.
- This work was a bit different. I created two MySQL triggers so if a user is added to a particular group by an administrator they are subscribed to receive notifications if new topics are created in a forum. I also created a trigger to remove the forum notification if they are removed from the group.
- A client needed URLs embedded in the post text changed as the image hosting service has moved it to a new domains (postimg.cc and postimages.cc). It’s fairly simple to do once I finally figured out about the MySQL replace function. I also installed the Member Profile Views extension (1.0.3) for the client. Later, I updated the Cleantalk extension to the latest version. While I was in there removed 3 dead extensions from the extensions table that were showing as ugly error messages on the Install extension screen. I also help create a new BBCode to serve embedded videos from a site and updated the latest version of phpBB Gallery from the GitHub master: version 3.2.2.
- Upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.0.11 to phpBB 3.2.2. Installed Allan Style Subsilver. Placed a new logo. Installed Advertisement Management extension and placed two old ads, changing the image URL a bit. The forum has 200,000 posts. One minor issue during upgrade: I had to make active the prosilver style for it to complete.
- Completed a messy upgrade from phpBB 3.0.12 to 3.2.2 on GoDaddy hosting. The file folder was missing and was apparently dropped a month or so back when user went over quota, and was not recoverable. This meant lots of images embedded in posts would not show. The user has to live with this. I had to move the database to my machine to convert it, due to severe resource limitations on GoDaddy. The phpBB native search index creation did not work, so I created a MySQL Full Index one instead. mChat was previously installed as a mod. I had to manually remove all traces of it to get the mChat extension to install. Many tables were missing primary keys, indexes and automatic increment settings. I eventually figured out this was an issue with bigdump.php, a staggered MySQL importer I used, as it nears the end of a database extract file sometimes and hangs. These are stored at the bottom of the file and it never said it completed. It took an hour or so to create the missing indexes and primary keys. I did not move over tables for the search index, topic tracking information, the session information or the logs due to size issues. I could not find a way to remove spam posts easily but did remove old inactive users. Installed reCaptcha V2. Installed Tapatalk, Advertisement Management (to place ads at top and bottom), ShareOn, mChat (after cleanup) and OneAll Social Login extensions. Adjusted forum permissions so newly registered users could post without permission and gave full access permissions to all forums for all major groups.
- As with the first client, I changed some URLs in the post text to use postimg.cc and postimages.cc. This one though was a bit different because periods were stored as HTML entities in the database. I also spent an hour trying to make the upload attachments feature work since he did not want to use external services anymore for posting images and he had plenty of space. There were lots of permissions issues to puzzle through. I had to change forum access privileges for registered users to full access. I also had to set the upload permission for the registered users to allow it and change the quota for uploaded images from just 1MB to 10GB.
