So I’m starting to port my extensions to phpBB 3.3.
I’m surprised by how easy it has been, at least compared with porting my extensions from phpBB 3.1 to 3.2. This is because not much has changed between 3.2 and 3.3.
In moving from 3.1 to 3.2, there were all sorts of changes under the hood that made porting extensions challenging. The way posts were encoded in the phpbb_posts table was changed, which was a big deal. FontAwesome support, which was very limited, was introduced, meaning we could use these in our templates instead of embedding images. A new TWIG library meant that the old way we extension authors inserted dynamic data into pages changed pretty fundamentally. We were asked to use a new template syntax in our templates. Template library calls also changed quite a bit. In short, 3.1 to 3.2 required quite a bit of reengineering, both of the phpBB base code but also of its extensions.
For 3.3, there’s not much upgrading of the database needed. Only one table is altered: phpbb_users, to change the properties of the reset token. The content in the phpbb_extension_groups table is changed. The Flash media group finally goes away (Flash is obsolete) and any non-Flash files in the group are now assigned to the downloadable files group.
As noted, you can use more Emoji codes in 3.3 and can put Emoji in a topic title. But this doesn’t alter the database. I have to test for these in my extensions, but so far it’s not a problem because the existing function I used to display these fields handles it for me. So nothing to do there.
So phpBB 3.3 feels more like an update to phpBB 3.2 than it does a new minor version. On the whole, the new functionality is quite minor. The main thing I have to do is test with PHP 7.4, since phpBB 3.3 now supports PHP 7.1.3 to 7.4 only. Getting my extensions to a stable 3.2 place before upgrading PHP is turning out to be much more work than retrofitting my extensions.
So yea for that.
