September was a bit slower than August, at least in terms of the number of jobs I was working on. But two clients kept me pretty busy.
I documented work on a Delphi Forums to phpBB conversion in this post. That work continues and is pretty challenging and tedious at times.
Also, the commercial work for a major client continues, in spurts. This client has custom headers and footers from the main web site that change frequently. I created an extension to do this a different way compared to the way they are doing it on PHP 5.6. They were replacing files in phpBB’s caceh folder. My solution is to store and retrieve these changes in/from the phpbb_config_text table instead. The extension’s cron update them at intervals set on an ACP page. The remaining technical challenge is to stand up an OAuth interface which they created for phpBB 3.0, but which will work different on phpBB 3.3, and use an extension. Then an alpha and beta stage is likely to begin. With luck the project will wrap up in the next few months.
Other jobs in September included:
- Upgraded two boards for a commercial client from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.1. I discovered that the AllanStyle SUBSILVER style wasn’t quite ready for phpBB 3.3 and I had to make changes to the navigation template to match changes in prosilver to get the breadcrumbs to work right. Also did some rearranging of forums for them and created a forum link for a forum. Also needed to rework the search engine on both boards to find more common terms and change some group forum permissions.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.1. I changed PHP from 5.6 to 7.2. Updated Advertisement management, Google Analytics, Recent Topics, Thanks for the Posts, Gallery and Tapatalk extensions. Added a new extension: New Topics need Approval and configured the permission for the one forum where it was to be used. The Plesk Let’s Encrypt module was installed, tried to generate a certificate but it doesn’t seem to register. Asked him to discuss that with his web host. Like with the last job, navigation bar template customizations in custom style required some rework due to changes in the prosilver version with phpBB 3.3. Set a new set of reCaptcha V2 keys because it needed to support Invisible type of CAPTCHA. There was an annoying error going into ACP related to a library program Iconv.php. To work around it, I had to change a statement to return false when the character set is not found. I really think this is a bug in the library as I’ve encountered this close to a dozen times for clients in the last year or so. Solutions on phpbb.com haven’t worked.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.1. Added three language packs: American English and both casual and formal honorifics German language packs. Changed reCaptcha V2 to use Invisible Captcha.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.0 to 3.3.1. Updated SEO Metadata extension from version 1.3.0 to 1.4.0. I changed the spambot countermeasure to reCaptcha V3. Recommended disabling contact form.
- Redid a lot of the work done in February now that this client was ready to move the domain to new hosting. But it was less work than I did in February since the styling was already done. I moved the phpBB 3.0.6 database over, imported it, and upgrade ran without issues. I reenabled the custom style I had created. I changed the spambot countermeasure to reCaptcha V3 and enabled it, disabled contact form.
- Work that amounted to rehosting but I didn’t have to move 100,000 phpBB Gallery files. The client did that with a little coaching. I did have to move the database. What triggered the rehosting was the client hit a 1GB database quota limit on his shared hosting. He bought some cloud hosting to move the domain’s content there. The files that were moved over by someone else were not in the right spot. I created a domain on the cloud hosting, and populated a database based on extracting it on the old host with phpMyAdmin. I upgraded the board from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.3.1 because PHP 7.2 was not available. I also upgraded phpBB Gallery, Advanced BBCode Box and Auto DB Backup extensions. I tweaked prosilver’s styling to prosilver to put the logo back up. There was a persistent certificate error until domain is pointing correctly and then Let’s Encrypt certificates could be generated.
- Upgraded board from phpBB 3.0.12 to 3.3.1. This board is an archive; another one was created for current content. Added the Prolight style and changed background color to red to match the old board. Also replaced and resized the logo and selectively made certain text white so it could be seen easily against the red background. But apparently I misunderstood to client’s custom changes. So later I changed the styling again to meet new requirements, and placed a different logo that I sized at 33% of original size.
