Month: March 2007

Was it all Worth it?

Well I sat down the other day and decided that I wasn’t happy with how Camsigh looked. I’d bolted a Blog mod onto the PHPBB forum and it was having problems with spammers and the code was rather messy. I’d also got functionality in the main board that I didn’t actually use – basically because it had been superceded by RSS feeds.

So I looked around and found that I liked WordPress and someone actually did a plug in that integrated it into PHPBB.

So some hacking around of WordPress and PHPBB and some tidying up and it all looked good.

To finish it all off I moved the board. Camsigh had been sitting in /board/ on one of my domains and I wanted to tidy things up so I registered another domain through DynDNS and made the appropriate adjustments inside the Board to get it working. I then put a rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the original directory to do forced re-writes to the new domain. Finally as I’d been doing all the reconfiguration work in a new database I had to export the user posts and private messages, search and replace any domain references (I use a PHPBB mod that allows you to upload and insert pictures) which had got buried in the posts.

Did I say that was it? Well it wasn’t: I then moved the posts from the old Blogging system into WordPress. Its not 100% correct but its near enough. There also seem to be a few navigational issues… which I’m looking into

Ahhhh – Life Returns to Normal

Well life in Cheltenham returns to normal. All the race goers who piled into town for the Gold Cup have now left, or are in the process of leaving. There were 52,000 for the first 3 days and 65,000 on the last day – still they had good weather for it, and I’m sure they had a good time. But I for one, am glad that they have gone.

The houses behind us are coming on at a speed so it will only be a couple more weeks before the excessive amount of light pushed out by the Sainsbury’s store, which currently lights our bedroom up like there is a full moon outside, is blocked by the new development.

PHPBB Mods – why the hell do we bother?

I’ve coded up a couple of mods for phpbb

and

The total down loads of these two mods is not huge but its not zero.

There was a bug in the Registration Variable MOD that no-one noticed.. or if they did notice they didn’t think to tell me.

If I download a MOD, especially a new one, I always try to comment on it, even if there aren’t any problems.

The people running PHPBB are wondering why people aren’t submitting MODS to their MODS database.

I suspect the answer is apathy. A lot of mods are coded up by people because they want to fix a specific problem or add a specific feature to their board. As an act of goodwill they release the change as a mod so that others can benefit. Those others take that code and then don’t bother getting back to the author if there are bugs or obvious enhancements.

Maybe its about time a lot of people using PHPBB put something back into the PHPBB community rather than just leaching off it all the time.