Things slowed down a bit in September, which was okay because I also started teaching a class this month.
I did have one large job at the start of the month that more than paid the rent. This was a commercial job and it involved moving a forum from phpBB 3.0.14 to 3.2.2. I was working as a subcontractor. The contractor’s client had a very particular look and feel to his forum and he wanted that to be retained as much as possible, so the challenge was to do this despite the fact that many modifications on the forum were not available as extensions. Obviously this meant making sure the style closely matched the phpBB 3.0 style. I did the prototyping work in a development environment. It took a long time to get things tweaked before I was given permission to move the changes into production. The first attempt at an upgrade of the database failed due to a resource timeout. The second attempt worked but took about six hours using command line interface. I installed the mChat, ReImg Imag Resizer, Google Analytics, Post Count Requirements and later NavBar search extensions. I set up Q&A spambot countermeasure. I removed dead modules and dead software including Tapatalk. The rest was styling work. I created a custom style based on Prosilver SE and then tried to emulate look of existing site. I added archives link to navigation bar, put the Twitter logo in the footer, and customized the footer to add link to site. Three templates were changed. Style customizations were placed in stylesheet.css. Later, there was four hours of additional styling work working from a punch list. One of the challenges was to do the work quickly. It was four days from start to finish. Given that this was a big forum, this was a moderate challenge.
Also in September:
- I updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.2. There was a routing error caused by modSecurity being enabled. I disabled it and was able to post. Also upgraded PHP from 5.5 to 7.1 for about 50% faster performance for the client.
- Similar to my last work for this client, I created MySQL triggers to subscribe people in the registered users and newly registered users groups to get topic and post notifications, but on a different domain.
- I updated a forum from phpBB 3.1.4 to 3.2.3. (phpBB 3.2.3 was released in the middle of the month.) I installed an updated Aero style. I removed the Board3 portal extension. I installed updated extensions: Topic Preview and Notify Admin on Registration. I upped PHP version to 5.6 from 5.4. I changed the spambot countermeasure to use reCaptcha V2. I installed my digests extensions (version 3.2.8) and tested email using both a manual test and cron.
- I updated phpBB from version 3.2.2 to 3.2.3 for a client using update files method. Updated five extensions that were out of date.
- I updated another forum from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.2.3. I updated the Tapatalk extension from 2.0.8 to 2.1.3. I had to reapply a style change to common.css.
With the release of phpBB 3.2.3, the phpBB group not only fixed some bugs that really needed fixing (including one that only allowed one attachment per post) and the migrator issues that gave me hell, but it also appears that the update program will now update any extensions that need updating, if the links work correctly. This is normally a good thing but if you wrote any custom changes to these extensions this might overwrite them, and there is no warning of this. You are not supposed to do this, but I have clients who have done this or asked me to do it for them. The update program really needs some sort of warning or a switch of some sort so these don’t happen automatically.
