I completed a major project this month, and that represented the bulk of my work. This nonprofit organization has been my clients for nine years now. Earlier in the year I convinced them they needed to move their forum off of phpBB 3.0 to the latest version. As they are surgeons it was hard to pin them down so it took months of sporadic back and forth. It’s nice to finally bring this home and collect a nice four figure paycheck for all the work. Their old forum had a number of modifications and code that I had inserted into the base code to do things like send an email notification with topic and post text to all members whenever a post was made. That won’t work with phpBB 3.2. It took a lot of experimentation to figure out something that was acceptable. Some of the things I did for them:
- Used DavidIQ’s mailing list extension to handle the post and topic notifications with the post text. I had to tailor it to make it send emails to all registered users, rather than just one email address. I also had to change the template text to meet their requirements.
- Installed five different styles and customized each to meet various styling requirements. I used the Quick style extension to give users an easy way to change styles on the navigation bar.
- Figured out a way that users could upload and embed “web ready” videos without needing to use the Quicktime plugin. IMHO this is a serious deficiency of phpBB that it won’t use the <video> tag for these formats like .mp4 and .ogg. Basically this meant hacking the attachment_body.html template. I also had to create a MP4 attachment type, add it to the Flash group, enable the Flash group and take other formats out of the Flash group. I also had to enable the documents attachment group. This allows other video types to be uploaded, however they have to be downloaded to be actually played. The general idea is to encourage these surgeons to upload MP4 files only.
- We quickly discovered that when MP4 videos were uploaded they were usually uncompressed. A 12 second video was 19.1MB! I found ffmeg, a command line utility that allows videos to be compressed, resized and moved from one format to another. I integrated ffmpeg into their virtual server and wrote a PHP script that once an hour looks for new videos. If it finds an uncompressed MP4, it compresses it using the “fast” method and updates the metadata for the file stored in the database. I used ffprobe to examine the video’s metadata, asked for it to output the data in a XML format, then used PHP’s DOM object to grab the information I needed. It took more than a day to write it, but it will save them lots of storage space as well as make videos faster to load and play. Given these videos are of surgery, they needed to be kept private so hosting on sites like YouTube was out of the question. The whole forum is tightly locked down to members only, and uses HTTPS to encrypt all communications.
There were lots of extensions installed as well in addition to other minor requirements addressed. Some extensions provided functionality identical to the mods they had, such as the Recent Topics extension. In a few cases they chose to drop the functionality of their old modification.
In any event, this project is largely closed although I expect a few bugs will manifest themselves in production use I will have to fix.
Other work in October:
- I updated a phpBB from from version 3.2.2 to 3.2.3. Installed a beta Medals extension.
- Spent two hours of labor on digest emailing issues. Since the hosting was GoDaddy, I pretty much knew what the problem was: GoDaddy blocks outgoing emails it thinks might be spam, and doesn’t bother to tell the client they are doing this. It basically takes a technical conversation with them and to get the client to certify that they really don’t have any inappropriate content or malware on their domains.
- Spent time troubleshooting an issue on why no posts were being created on a forum. The basic issue was low board traffic. Also updated phpBB from version 3.2.2 to 3.2.3.
- Answered some questions on user statistics and most users online. On the client’s old version of the forum, the number of users included a hack that added inactive users and bots. They really wanted that back so I changed /includes/acp/acp_main.php to include all types of users, and warned them this adds a complication with updates and upgrades.
- Updated two domains for the same client from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.2.3.
- Client needed to change the domain registrar from GoDaddy to another registrar for two domains. Helped her with this obscure process.
- Upgraded a vanilla prosilver style forum from phpBB 3.1.6 to 3.2.3. The upgrade was very slow and seemed to hang. I tried a few hours later and was able to get it to resume and finish. There was an issue related to moving to a new server and having PHP 7 installed, which triggered certain errors on phpBB 3.1. Replaced logo.
- Upgraded another vanilla prosilver forum from phpBB 3.1.10 to 3.2.3. I changed the spambot countermeasure to reCaptcha V2. I added latest Cleantalk extension. I changed user registration settings to user gets email. Changed PHP to version 7.
