Up until recently, the Website Team was a sleepy team within phpBB that acquired team members from other teams and worked behind closed doors in order to ensure the full operation of the website. It is a team that is not very well publicized nor is really known what exactly we do. It has had its lows and even fewer highs, but now the need is too great to keep our operation small and closed.

The past

This historically small team has been known to take current phpBB team members in prior to their departure, during a time where it is not easy for them to contribute much at all. General website maintenance fell to the team’s themselves, each of them taking care of their patron area of the website. While this worked for a while, it has caused more issues than it was worth. Our website is inundated with duplicate CSS, inefficiency in JavaScript, and general chaos in the backend code.

The present

During the past year, the website team has been making the transition from a sleepy team who takes care of few things to a more active team that handles day-to-day maintenance and testing prior to deployment of the website.

We’ve picked a few members and lost many. This is mainly due with the fact that this is only team where it is impossible to get help directly from the community because it’s an internal codebase. It may not have been very noticeable, but any team member the website team picked up was formerly on another team within phpBB.

The future

Currently, we have serveral maintenance projects we are overseeing and one very large project that’s early in development. Unfortunately, we are not in a position to announce these at the moment. I do think it is worth mentioning though, for we are eventually looking to adopt a more open model, even going so far as to release some new code we’re writing on github in an effort to pick up contributors.

To do so, however, we’ll need some help. The future of phpBB.com is a blank slate–and we’re looking for designers, programmers, and other individuals with skills who can help draft the slate into a reality. If you’d like to help out, and have the time and ability to do so, please contact Sam with samples of your work (P.S. being active on the forums on phpbb.com and Area51 are a huge plus). This is your opportunity to make an impact on the phpBB project for users, developers, team members, and more.

Millions of websites use phpBB to power their forums. These communities, ranging in size from just a few hundred to over 50 million posts, rely on phpBB’s efficiency, ease of use and level of customisability to provide a place for their users to come and talk about their unique interests, provide support for a line of products, or just have fun hanging out.

The phpBB Website Team is proud to announce the phpBB Showcase, a new section on the www.phpbb.com website which contains an assortment of unique forums throughout the internet which are powered by phpBB.

The showcase includes selections of forums which stand out to the phpBB Team. These include very large boards with hundreds of thousands of members and millions of posts, large enterprises and corporations using phpBB to power their forums, as well as other well-known open-source projects choosing to use phpBB.

While enjoying the showcase, we would like you to keep in mind that it is not intended to be a directory of phpBB forums on the internet, but rather a selection of forums across the internet which are, in a certain aspect, unique.

If there’s a forum powered by phpBB that you would like to see included in the showcase, we invite you to suggest a site. Sites are added on a case-by-case basis using the criteria above.

We will regularly amend the showcase with new boards as we are made aware of them. We look forward to showing off some of the cool things users have done with phpBB while building their impressive communities.

No! I’m not talking about military bases or U.S. conspiracy theories, but rather phpBB’s very own Area51 – http://area51.phpbb.com

Area51 is phpBB’s official testing ground, and as stated on the site it is the home of “bleeding edge developmental code”. The site was established in 2001 – the brainchild of psoTFX, the former leader of the development team, in order to have a local installation of phpBB that they could test in a real life situation. With the main phpBB.com forum obviously out of the question, Area51.phpbb.com can be used so that the developers can see how the latest code is holding up with many concurrent users online, without fear of users becoming annoyed if certain features aren’t working (which I will touch on in a minute).

Area51 boasts the unique feat of hardly changing at all and always changing at the same time.

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As the world moves towards Web 2.0, it is becoming increasingly important to have a dynamic website – something which most people are using the PHP language to achieve. Unlike the use of HTML by itself to create a website, HTML and PHP together allow a website to be much more flexible, such as connecting to a database.

If you are running a bulletin board based on phpBB3, then it is worthwhile considering the benefits of integrating your main website into phpBB3.

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