Month: March 2020

This was a fairly ordinary month, but I have started two long-term projects, details of which are below. Both should keep the business comfortably afloat for much of the year.

Work on my book Mastering phpBB Administration continues. It is still with an editor but should complete editing within a few weeks. It still needs cover art, reformatting, and setting up a publish on demand mechanism. I’ll probably offer it as both an eBook and a printed book. Existing clients will be entitled to a discount. Figuring out the pricing will be challenging. At over 300 pages, it’s a lot of information. Publish on demand allows both color and black and white copies to be requested, but color copies are much more expensive to produce, so I may offer both at different price points. Price will probably not be less than $19.95 a copy. Stay tuned for more details.

• Began an exploration on whether a Delphi forum could be converted to phpBB. The client provided a set of .yaml files with the board’s posts, which also includes some images that were in the posts. My basic approach is to see if I can get the data into a format that can be converted into the old phpBB 2 database format successfully. Is so, then it could be converted to phpBB 3.3, the ultimate goal. The first step was to try to find a good YAML parser. I tried a number of approaches but eventually I used Symfony’s yaml parser in my script and that seemed to work reliably. The .yaml files were not perfect YAML, so I had to do a bit of editing to get files to parse correctly. I parsed the first 500 posts and placed the result in a HTML table with a script, then did the same thing with a .yaml file with the user information. These were sent to the client. The client will discuss with his group whether he wants to fund further research, but it looks likely because it looks like there is enough data in these files to populate a phpBB 2 database. He will get back to me in a couple of weeks.
• A client was running out of quota and asked me to figure out how to solve the issue. 4.9GB out of 5GB was in use. Problem was WordPress backups in a backup folder. Suggested removing old backups. Once identified, client took care of issue.
• After large upgrade to phpBB by a client, the modules for my digests extension got lost. On Skype, I walked him through the process of creating both the ACP and UCP digest modules manually.
• Upgraded and rehosted board from phpBB 3.0.5 to phpBB 3.3.0. The new hosting is on Siteground. The old hosting was on a Windows server. Fortunately, MySQL was used on the Windows hosting, so there was no database to be converted. There were some technical issues on both hosts with downloading databases and making archives. Siteground’s new site tools turned out to be confusing as cPanel was not an option. I could not grant permissions to the database user I created to database I created. It took two tech support calls but eventually it all worked. I created a custom style to show logo, otherwise default prosilver style was used. I disabled the contact page and created reCaptcha V2 Invisible spambot countermeasure.
• I provide ongoing support for a client’s business board. I investigated an emailing issue where emails were getting flagged as likely spam when sent to wvu.edu. The client’s domain is not on an email blacklist. This was something on wvu.edu’s end and the easiest way to deal with the problem was to have change the board user’s email address. I provided instructions on how to change email address used by the board. At the end of the month I updated two packages in Plesk and updated Plesk to version 18.0.24. Also, changed one user’s email address. She was not getting email notifications because the address had changed and she didn’t know how to change it in phpBB.
• I restored a lost board. Originally it looked like a backup of phpBB 3.0.11 was available, but it wouldn’t upgrade since some tables were in a phpBB 2 format and some not. The client found an older phpBB 2 database backup and I was able to convert that offline to phpBB 3.3. In the first conversion, the attachments were missing so I had to do it over again. I also changed the board to use to https. A few minor errors were encountered. I had to add an auto increment to the phpbb_logs table’s primary key. I set up reCAPTCHA and disabled contact page.
• Updated forum from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.3.0. I had to comment out Options -MultiViews in .htaccess file to avoid HTTP error. Also had to remove install_config.php file in the store folder to get the upgrade to start. Otherwise there were no issues. User had warnings that were due to PHP 7.3 being enabled on his host, which is not supported by phpBB 3.2.
• Began work for a new long-term client who has a large job to upgrade his phpBB 3.0.11 board to phpBB 3.3. This will take many months as there are many customizations embedded in the source code itself that need to be turned into extensions. This month I mostly looked through their changes to phpBB 3.0.11 and advised on the best approach. The first step will be to try to change the style to work with phpBB 3.3. The style uses SCCS and needs to link in a lot of CSS and HTML used for the master website. I may develop some of the extensions myself of work with other extension authors to have some develop them. Some look very complex, such as a proprietary OAuth integration. But it’s commercial work and pays very well, so it should be both challenging and financially rewarding. More on this in coming months.