My work in April and May was surreally slow. Happily, this was not the case in June. Work just kept coming in and it got a little frantic at times. A lot of it was hairy upgrades from phpBB 3.0, something of a speciality of mine. Once I get paid for all my work, I should reach my midyear revenue goal which if it repeats for the second half of the year should top last year’s income, then an all time high.
- The original issue was blank screen that users were having accessing the forum. It was some sort of security issue. Someone, probably the web host, placed a line at the top of the forum’s .htaccess file that triggered the issue. Commenting out the first line of the file brought the board up. Next I was asked to upgrade the from from phpBB 3.0.11 to 3.2.7. I completed the upgrade completed with no issues. I installed the prosilver_se style, but made a number of tweaks to remove rounded corners, apply their logo across the entire background, put black along the sides of document window and to add two links to the navigation bar. I then installed an unapproved version of the Board3 Portal extension that seemed to work with phpBB 3.2 correctly. I edited the .htaccess file so portal page came up first. The portal though was not quite ready for prime time. Time showed an issue with adding new portal modules, so I was asked to disable it.
- I updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.2.7. I reinstalled an updated version of the prosilver_se style and their logo. I added the ACP Add User extension, which allows administrators to create new users. This is a popular extension for locked down boards where registration is disallowed. I tried to upgrade PHP to 7.2 on Bluehost but it didn’t take. I suggested the client file a ticket to get it properly upgraded. It took a few days but Bluehost finally came through.
- Troubleshooting for a long-existing client’s forum. Negative values for the number of unread of unread private messages were appearing on the navigation bar, possibly due to a bug in my digests extension. I created some SQL that addressed the problem, and implemented it on both their development and production boards. I then upgraded both the development and production forums from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.2.7. I also upgraded my digests extension on both forums from 3.2.10 to 3.2.13 and applied a patch that should prevent negative values from being stored.
- I updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.4 to 3.2.7. I also updated the board’s Latte style, being careful not to overwrite changes and to recompile the style (it uses .sccs files). I updated my digests extension from version 3.2.10 to 3.2.13 and the Media embed extension to version 1.1.0. Later in the month there was additional work. Emails wouldn’t go out; they were being captured by a web host’s outgoing email spam filter. I chatted with the web host. They told me to change the email server name and email started working again. I disabled the user control panel interface again for digests as the client wanted to be the only subscriber.
- I upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.0.12 to 3.2.7. I used a standard prosilver style installation with a logo. The forum has about 100,000 posts and there were no mods to worry about. It took about an hour to do the upgrade but there were no issues during the upgrade. I disabled the contact form. I enabled the reCaptcha V2 spambot countermeasure. I added a home link and placed their logo in the header. I made a test post to make sure it was working well. I suggested changing PHP to 7.2 and see if other software on the site crashed and if not leave it at PHP 7.2. PHP 5.6 is currently being used.
- Big project #1. The forum required an upgrade from phpBB 3.0.14 to 3.2.7 but had to be rehosted at the same time. This is because the content on the forum is sensitive in the country where it is used. It was reported and the web host (FatCow BTW) just shut it down. Fortunately, they were able to get the database and files ported over to the new host. There I created a test upgraded version of the forum and did my best to replicate the many features and unique look of the forum on phpBB 3.2.7. Fortunately the existing metrolike style was available and most of the modifications on the board for phpBB 3.0 were available for phpBB 3.2 as extension. The number of extensions desired though was highly unusual and was in the dozens, and not all were approved. Invariably, a few modifications did not have equivalent extensions, so some things required manual changes. For example, there is a unique message that shows to new users inviting them to register that was not able to be done with an extension, primarily because it had to show only to guests. I added this manually into the forum’s header with template logic to show only to guests. In addition, the client wanted forum permissions changed, keeping everyone from reading forums with sensitive content but allowing search indexes to still index its content. I did this by creating a special group and giving read permissions only to people in this special group. It took a lot of back and forth and since the client was nervous it was done via email. I had hoped to use Skype to work through the myriad questions. I was paid for the analysis and waited for permission to do the formal upgrade, which I got yesterday and finished. The client is now reviewing it.
- Big project #2. This was a lot like the last big project in many ways, except the forum does not contain sensitive content, but is a big and very successful forum based in Australia. The board was a heavily modded phpBB 3.0.5 installation that needed to be completely migrated to phpBB 3.2.7. I began with a test installation of phpBB 3.2.7 to try styling and extensions. It soon became clear that we needed a full test upgrade, upgrading a copy of the whole production database, not to mention more than 100,000 image files. There were so many images that the client ran out of hosting space. So I solved it with a symbolic link to the old files folder. phpBB Gallery was a big part of this upgrade and had to move successfully. Unfortunately, the version of phpBB Gallery for phpBB 3.2 is not approved. The original developer abandoned it, someone else took it up and it was buggy. So there was a lot of trial and error to get not just attached images but phpBB Gallery to work acceptably. It was apparently too big a project for the last developer who tried to do this upgrade. He left due to mental health issues. (It’s unclear if it was related to this work!) The full test upgrade revealed a host of challenges. For example, I ended up manually adding and removing columns from phpBB Gallery tables to port the data over successfully and get rid of a lot of errors. There were also logout issues on the existing forum that emerged, issues with the upgrade itself where we ran out of memory (on virtual hosting!), making everything quite challenging. There were also issue with the Javascript lightbox integration. I’m happy to say that it all went well thanks to the full trial and a lot of beta testing by the board admin and his beta testing team. Still finishing some of the final tweaks and there may be more work to add security certificates and upgrade PHP. There are other applications on the domain that apparently aren’t PHP 7 compatible.
- Updated a forum for an existing client from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.2.7. Updated prosilver_se style and language pack (Danish) as well.
- Maintenance work for an existing forum for medical professionals. I’ve had them as a client for nearly ten years now! I added and configured the Board Rules extension using text provided by the client. It acts as a disclaimer of sorts. I made signing off on it to be required by new users. In Plesk, I updated 20 packages that needed updating. Later, I updated phpBB from version 3.2.3 to 3.2.7, updated the phpBB Media Embed and my digests extension. I updated four of the 5 styles in use because they had newer versions.
- Urgent request from another client in Australia. My Smartfeed (version 3.2.10) extension would not run. I was given SSH access but didn’t have much in the way of clues in the error log. Eventually I just disabled the extension, then enabled it again and it worked.
