The new version of the phpBB forum has been a long time coming but was finally released just a couple of days ago. I decided to update the one forum that I still have set up (my Railway Community forum) to use the new version.

So far I have seen several things I was impressed with and a couple of things that disappointed me. Just the range of options in the admin function of the new forum is amazing. I haven’t even had time to look through it all yet but there are now about eight or so tabs across the top and a couple of those that I did look in have about as many options each as the entire phpBB2 had in its entirety.

A couple of the things I found disappointing so far. Firstly the site description at the top of the forum no longer allows HTML code in it - only plain text - requiring that I patch one of the files right from the start in order to maintain the link I had there. A second problem was the somewhat ugly colour scheme that the forum presents by default and the lack of ease of identifying replacement phpBB3 themes (every theme I found appeared to be for phpBB2 even though I specified 3 in my search criteria). I managed to fix that by manually editing two images and the theme stylesheet myself to replace the dark blue colour with a lighter blue. Finally trhe search option required a reindex of the web pages and that gave errors when I tried to run it.

Overall not too bad for a new release and time will tell how much further changes I will need to make. Now all I need is some more members on that forum to make it worth having it there.

Tags: forum, html, phpbb, search criteria, trhe search option