phpBB
phpBB is an internet forum which has been developed using the PHP programming language and is an abbreviation for PHP Bulletin Board. Like its parents, phpBB is a free software. It was started by a person called James Atkinson who intended it to be a forum for his own website in 2000 and a fully functional version was released on the 1st of July, 2000.
There were a number of improvements made on phpBB and the final version 1.x was released in November 2001. phpBB 1.x is no longer used on websites nor is it supported by PHP.
The second version, phpBB 2.x was developed starting in February 2001 and has been supported by more and more advanced versions of PHP.
Thereafter phpBB 3.x came about towards the end of 2002. In March 2007, the server shut down temporarily for maintenance but the server then crashed and phpBB.com was shut for more than a week. Thereafter the new phpBB site was launched which came as a surprise as it was not supposed to be launched till the release of the phpBB. 3.0.0.
The current version is phpBB3 and it just went gold less than a month ago. The latest version does not allow HTML tags due to which administrators have to either keep their existing links or upgrade to the new software, a very hard to make decision.
It features support for multiple data systems such as MySQL and others and also supports unlimited number of sub forums. It has the ability to create custom-defined BBCode and also to create custom profile fields. PhpBB3 has higher security levels than its predecessor phpBB2 and it was completely rewritten to have a more secure code base. After a large number of websites were destroyed and the latest version keeps receiving security audits.
Filed under: PHP, Website Design
