I’m a few days late on this, but I’d like to be the 738,535th person to congratulate the phpBB Group on the long-awaited release of their fantastic forum software, phpBB 3.0.0. It’s been an incredibly long nearly six-year road, with a number of bumps along the way. I’ve been following the development of phpBB since late 2001, and the one thing I can tell you is that pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. (A little hyperbole never hurts.)
Even so, the changing team persevered, and here, as an early Christmas (or whatever December-ish holiday you choose to celebrate) present, we find ourselves with the gold version of an excellent piece of software. I’m still not an incredible fan of flat-style messaging, and phpBB certainly has areas where it could improve. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to see all the hard work finally come to fruition.
As both a (pretty much former) MOD developer and a user, my greatest hope is that with this release, the team is able to put the problems of the past behind them, and work towards far more frequent releases. Even I would find myself hard-pressed to continue to support their efforts if the next release is phpBB4 sometime in 2013. (Those of us in the know will recall that what became phpBB 3.0.0 was originally slated to be phpBB 2.2.0, an incremental improvement to phpBB2 itself. My, how things change, with phpBB3 in effect becoming nearly as much of a rewrite as phpBB2 was.)
If you’re looking for good, free forum software, I suggest you download it today. If phpBB’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other solutions, and you’ll find an ample list over at Wikipedia.
In a semi-related note, it’s becoming less and less likely that I’m going to find the motivation to work on my Custom Title MOD. As I’ve said before, it’s simply not a feature I’m currently using on any of my sites. It’s possible that could change in the future, but until then, I’d fully support any other developer who wants to update my alpha version for 3.0.0 and maintain and support it. Or write it from scratch, if you want. If the feature’s in demand enough, I’m sure it’ll pop up somehow. (I still have hope that certain features in phpBB 3.2 will make such a MOD completely unnecessary. We shall see.)