I stayed busy in April. The bulk of my work was for a commercial client, work that has been ongoing since February 2020. This work is part of a large project to upgrade their phpBB 3.0.11 board with lots of custom tailoring to phpBB 3.3, keeping the custom logic but moving it into extensions. Since last autumn we’ve been challenged to make a custom OAuth authentication work. In this case the client has its own OAuth server, so it’s a matter of creating an extension that handles this correctly. The good news is by the end of the month we had solved the last major OAuth integration issues. So my next step is to analyze the issues to replicate their moderation changes. The poster’s profile description on the view topic page contains information only seen by moderators including links to their order history. In addition there are two new moderation control panel screens with logic. Presumably this will handled by an extension. So this work tended to keep me busy and fill in time that would otherwise be slow.
Other work I did in April:
- Converted a board from phpBB 2.0.21 to phpBB 3.3.3. There are only 1400 posts on this board. The major issue I dealt with was infrastructure related. The database server had been moved and old forum wasn’t connected up right to it. This involved lots of tedious back and forth conversation with the hosting company to get it fixed. The host also had to upgrade PHP to 7.2 because the control panel interface wouldn’t let me do it. After that the conversion was straightforward. I created a new phpbb3 database. I disabled the contact page and set up reCaptcha V3 spambot countermeasure. I re-created the search index and set a home link. I removed a dead report statistics module and changed the cookie name to address login issues. The old board’s files were moved into an archive folder.
- Client’s board was having a problem sending email. I tried a number of things to no avail. Client worked with host and they upgraded to PHP 7.3. I reverted the email settings for the boarad to non-SMTP and a test mail reportedly went out. Later, I upgraded board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.3. I had to update the custom style to make it work on phpBB 3.3. The work was mostly on the breadcrumb menu, which changed with phpBB 3.3. New versions of LightBox, Thanks for the Posts and Cleantalk extensions were uploaded and enabled.
- I upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.3.3. This is a generic board with all the defaults and no custom styling. One weird issue occurred: an error saying all extensions were disabled but only default Viglink was installed and probably not used. Eventually I solved it by re-uploading a program that appears to have not uploaded correctly: dummy.php.
- Installed phpBB 3.3.3 in a subdomain. Installed the proprietary Milk style. Tutored client for one hour online. Later, answered more questions and uploaded an extension for the client, who is new to phpBB.
- Working with a client that eventually wants to upgrade their board to the latest. Their calendar mod is not available as an extension, so I installed a couple calendar extensions on my test board and let them see if one of them would meet their needs. It looks like one of them will, so I upgraded their testing board with the extension and some style changes with the hope of eventually upgrading the production board with these changes too. Work included a half hour chat over Zoom.
- Attempted to upgrade a board but couldn’t because of FTP issues with hosting. Maximum of eight user connections allowed and these seem to stack up. FTP became essential because there was to interface on web host control panel to create or decompress archive. Spent an hour on technical support trying to resolve this with no success.
- Finished a huge, hairy, and frustrating upgrade to phpBB on old GoDaddy hosting that only supported PHP 5. Move to new hosting plan had issues with MySQL buffer size that couldn’t be fixed. I tried to move to 3.2.11 on old plan, but after dropping the tables I was unable to load the converted tables due to shared hosting limitations. On my recommendation, the client eventually moved to Dreamhost and that worked on PHP 7.4 and phpBB 3.3.3. I installed four extensions, one style, a Bulgarian language pack, replaced logo and rebuilt search index.
- Troubleshooting. The client was having issue with some images not displaying. He thought it was a Lightbox extension issue. There were about 100 orphaned attachments that were likely the root of the problem. Later, recovered the database but could not get into ACP. I purged the cache in the file manager and I was able to get into the ACP with his credentials.
- I upgraded a board with 1.44M posts from phpBB 3.0.6 to phpBB 3.3.3. Client used a custom style but had no mods installed. I downloaded their database and converted it on my machine with no issues. Uploading database took a while due to many repeated 504 Gateway Timeout issues. I split the posts table into ten exports and eventually got all posts and all other tables moved over. Issue logging into ACP was due to colon in the database name. There is a patch to fix this that I installed and it should be fixed in phpBB 3.3.4. I installed the French language pack. I disabled the contact page and enabled the reCaptcha V3 spambot countermeasure. Later, the search index had to be rebuilt again. Spent ninety minutes on styling changes.
- Build a commercial client for some minor work over the last few months, mostly related to troubleshooting issues that at its root were due to Tapatalk servers going down, and Tapatalk sending erroneous emails suggesting that upgrading their phpBB extension would solve the problem.
