I did plenty of work in January, just not so much for clients. That business was slow, but picked up toward the end of the month, so much so that at the moment it looks like my plate in February should be full.
Why was I busy? I was writing and editing a book on phpBB administration. The introduction of phpBB 3.3 Proteus on January 6th added work, as I needed to update the book to talk about phpBB 3.3. As I noted, its feature set makes it more of a micro release than a minor release, so that part was good. But by changing the phpBB logo and a few other things, I had to recapture fifty or more screenshots, which was tedious and time consuming. Then of course the text had to be revised in places which also meant reading it through twice more. Right now it stands at 305 pages on 8.5 x 11 inch paper.
I reached a milestone of sorts when I turned it over for editing on Thursday. I should mention that I am using Maria Williams, so if you need an editor, hit her up! It will take her a couple of weeks for her to do her magic, then I have to figure out how to publish and market the book. I need cover art. Publishing will likely be on demand, and I expect most people will want electronic copies. I also need to figure out how to price it. It’s a sizable capital investment of time and money, so it needs to be profitable. I expect to offer some sort of discount for the first ninety days and for my existing clients. The last book published on the topic was written in 2006, so it described phpBB 2, so the market is out there. Also, that was a user guide, not an administrator’s guide.
Otherwise:
- Added two users and forced a reactivation of two other users for a commercial client, who outsources this work to me.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.2.7 to 3.2.9. Also, I created a new forum with a forum logo on the board. I resized and placed a forum image logo with the forum, and put it in the requested place on the index. I gave the forum permissions similar to another forum. I investigated issues in the error log. Most of these errors seems to be due to debug being turned on.
- More analysis for a client I did work for in December. I generated a list of users and email addresses on his archived forum that had contributed at least 1 post but whose usernames were not on the current forum. He will use the list to invite them to come to the new board. I installed a release candidate extension to creating lots of user accounts in bulk, but it didn’t work as advertised. I did some styling changes. I upped base font 1 pixel to 12pixels. Client wanted to know if my digests extension can show text only. Yes, and I sent him a sample. He wants digests generated by my extension to look similar to someone else’s digest. I deleted a user defined moderator group. I provided guidance on using the ACP Add User extension so lots of old users could be added. He would like to delegate the work to someone else, so discussed how this could be done with ACP permissions so their access was tightly limited in the ACP.
- Client’s board wouldn’t come up on Bluehost hosting. After some analysis, I determined he had a phpBB 2.0.19 board and that only PHP 7 was available. He did have attachments. I converted the board to phpBB 3.3.0. Issues logging on were solved by removing the domain’s cookies, clearing browser cache and resetting the password, which was set back. I moved the old board into forum_old folder. I created the search index, disabled contact page, added Invisible reCAPTCHA. The resulting board is very basic. It may need some customization, styles and extensions installed. Later there was additional work. The client needed some gallery software. The phpBB Gallery extension is not being maintained and is not reliable, so looked for a solution outside of phpBB. I tried one solution, then tried another. Piwigo seemed to work after I installed a Community plugin/extension. This allowed users to upload their own pictures.
- I updated a board from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.9 on generic prosilver style. I updated my digests extension to version 3.2.17 and the Cleantalk extension to version 5.7.2.
- I upgrade board from phpBB 3.2.7 to 3.3.0. I updated the prosilver SE style to 3.2.9 and put the old logo back. I changed the spambot countermeasure to reCaptcha V2 invisible, since spam registrations were a complaint.
- Client wanted active topics in red on the navigation bar. First tried installing the Advanced Active Topics extension (release candidate) but couldn’t get it to show. I then installed the Recent Topics extension as a trial, but client didn’t like it, so I created a special link on the navigation bar, highlighted in red, moving it from the Quick Links menu.
- I upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.0. I replaced the logo.I checked all the extensions and they seemed to work on phpBB 3.3 with no issues, but there was no test case for change post time extension to verify it worked properly.
- More work for a client on spam. Used Prune Users feature to remove users and their posts who registered after Feb 10, 2018 when spam seemed to start in earnest. Reenabled board and suggested ways to mitigate the problem in the future with moderation, digests, etc. This is discussed in more detail in this blog post.
- This work is still ongoing. On Hostgator hosting, I created space for five domains and set up DNS for these domains. I set up five boards on five subdomains of these domains. All have a basic configuration, registration disabled, reCaptcha enabled, prosilver_se style applied, contact form disabled, and forwarder set up to redirect to client’s email address. Set up https redirection by installed WordPress SSL plugin on the main blog. Next, I cloned four WordPress instances based on work on one domain, whose theme and plugins client wanted to replicate. I did this by copying the files and database, changing the wp-config.php file to point to the new database, and tweaking the site information in the wp_options table. This saved a lot of time and work for the client.
