April was a fairly quiet month work-wise. This meant some downtime which, for a change, did not involve too much in the work of extension development but actual leisure. This is in part because most of my extensions are pretty stable including most notably the digests extension, which is definitely my most complicated extension. Toward the end of the month I did put out an April 2022 edition of my book on phpBB administration.
For my large commercial client, whose work I am largely wrapping up, we went through a “smoke test” following a detailed testing plan I put together. This precedes a more formal test by a larger group. But as often happens my client was pulled away by other tasks, which meant that meetings and tests were often delayed. But my test plan was good and having a second set of eyes helped a lot. We found a number of issues that had escaped earlier notice and that required some fixing and rework. For example, since phpBB 3.0 the search interface on a forum or a topic has changed and the advanced fields had new controls I had overlooked replicating. This was easily fixed. More problematic was a bunch of Javascript logic tied to a change in a custom header when the device’s screen width slipped below a mobile breakpoint. I spent at least six hours trying to figure out how to fix the Javascript and eventually succeeded.
Other client work accomplished in April:
- Upgraded two boards: a read-only archive board and the real currently interactive board, both from phpBB 3.2.7 to phpBB 3.3.7. I replaced Pro Ubuntu Lucid style to version 3.0.6 on both, made changes to two templates that were needed to the custom style that inherits from the Pro Ubuntu Lucid style and upgraded two extensions: Advertisement management to version 2.0.6 and Large Font to version 3.2.3.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to phpBB 3.3.7. This time I created a custom style called “custom” inheriting from prosilver so future upgrades will require less rework. All style changes are in the custom style’s stylesheet.css file. I updated the board announcements extension to version 1.10 and media embed extension to version 1.1.2.
- Rehosted and upgrade a phpBB 3.0.12 board, moving it to phpBB 3.3.7. I updated the style so it was a near match for the old one, but response, on my local server. Client suggested an extension to get the logo image to be responsive, which I was struggling with. It worked very well. After a week or so of delay, I rehosted the board and then upgraded board. New hosting and renaming nameservers issues caused a 24 hour delay. The database had to be moved in chunks, with five chunks for the post table to avoid timeouts on the old host. I had to set an active style in the database, otherwise there were no issues during upgrade. I installed the Tapatalk extension. I then installed the custom style I created earlier. I set a home link and disabled the contact page, then set up reCaptcha V3 as a spambot countermeasure. I created a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. I then rebuilt the search index since those tables were not moved over. I removed old dead modules in ACP then added and configured the Header Banner extension.
- Spent ninety minutes tutoring a client on Zoom
- Updated a board from phpBB version 3.3.5 to 3.3.7 and the advertisement management extension from version 2.0.5 to 2.0.6. Also edited .htaccess file to show the Board 3 extension portal page by default.
- Chased an annoying certificate problem for a commercial client on MediaTemple VPS hosting
