Another web-guy talking …

For Phorum-5.2 we (or better Maurice ;)) are trying to get some more documentation for Phorum.
Maurice does a damned good job in providing developer docs together with starting it all in docbook-format
but, as usual, most developers aren’t good documentation writers and therefore the documentation is lacking a lot of content.
We were also trying to get at least for the user-documentation some users to write but got exactly 0 replies about it.
Why is it so hard to get someone to write docs which he could use for his users to explain how to use the Phorum and would help others with the same task?
How are other projects handling this? All documentation written by the developers?
I’m pretty sure that there are some admins out there who have written docs for their users but unfortunately no one is interested in contributing them :(.

So for 3 months lighttpd is now in the top 5 list of netcraft statistics.
I actually tried lighttpd before using LiteSpeed-Webserver which is a commercial product (with a free standard-version) but for my use-case superior to use. Maybe they are on par performance-wise, I don’t know and didn’t do enough benchmarks to tell but the usability is totally different.
According to netcraft there are more than a million domains hosted on lighttpd now but why is there no Webinterface to configure it? Do the users see this as useless? I don’t really like to be depending on SSH-access for changing something in my webserver configuration when I’m on the road and missing input validation like a webinterface could do.
Also why is there no support to use .htaccess-files or at least search for .htaccess-files and convert them to something lighttpd likes? LiteSpeed supports .htaccess files with a cache so that it isn’t as much a performance hit as it was previously.
I would be really afraid of opening lots of holes while switching to lighttpd because I secured a ton of directories with simply a “Deny from all” in .htaccess-files and sometimes “Basic Authentication”.
Why does it have to be so hard?

So finally Maurice (who would see a link here if he had a blog ;-)) reminded be to talk about it … .

Finally we had our first Phorum-Developers meeting when we went to the MySQL-Conference last April.
Which was a great experience and I have to thank MySQL AB for the invitation to the DotOrg Pavilion.

But all the time there I have been hit by Blue Screens on my ThinkPad (yeah I know, bad to have Windows running but I think its still better with Windows on Laptops than Linux).
There must be something bad about US-WLAN-networks as I never had this problem before and only got it there when connecting to the Conference-WLAN.
Do they use some different channels or frequencies? I really don’t know as I just want to have a working connection.
Unfortunately it didn’t fix itself when coming back to Germany. I still had occasional crashes with the infamous blue-screen.
Only a full reinstall of the OS and all the precious applications helped.

So much about US-Wireless-networks :(.

We’ve (the folks from Phorum) been talking in the last days about using the new DateTime object in PHP for Phorum as it has a nice way to use timezones including their DST setting.
Up to now we have just a setting where the user select if DST is current active or not as there isn’t really an easy way for use to enable/disable DST automatically.
Using that object would allow us to let the user select its timezone (with the timezone-select generated from that DateTime Object) and have DST automatically adjusted or better, we would not have to care about DST once a timezone is selected as its done automatically.

But unfortunately there is no localization of the date/time formats names in that new object.
Derick tells that “It’s intentional for PHP 5.2, not for PHP 6.0.” which is not really satisfying in my opinion.
In Phorum we are using strftime which formats time and date by the locale settings which are done through our language-files too.
So we can’t really get this behaviour through the new DateTime stuff and therefore I can’t really agree with Brian that its the feature we want in Phorum and that would require PHP-5.2.
It would only work half-way, too bad. A good idea which wasn’t completely finished.

Oh yeah, some people will remember me talking about charset hell when it wasn’t really that bad (yet).
But in the near future I will surely have to solve some charset problems for MySnip.de.
It is still running MySQL-4.0.x which didn’t support charsets like MySQL-4.1 did and even more MySQL-5 is doing now.
But as MySQL-4.0 support has run out I really need to upgrade soon and then I’ll probably find myself in a lot of charset troubles ;).
First one will start with the upgrade itself. How will it look like after the upgrade? Default charset will probably be latin1 so it *should* be fine. But will it?
Beside that this upgrade is already some trouble as I will need to dump/restore the whole databases which are quite some GB’s and I hate to take the services down for some hours.

For now I’m finding enough excuses like I need to wait for Phorum-5.2 until I can upgrade but in the end I can’t do it all at once.
I still hope that Phorum-5.2 will still run on MySQL4 so that I can upgrade Phorum first and then convert to MySQL5 (for now I see no problems with that).
But Brian has announced that he doesn’t care about PHP4 and MySQL4 either as we are all developing on MySQL5 and PHP5.2 (which is correct, my development environment is like that too) - we’ll see what I can do about it ;).

Seems like I’m running a really explosive mixture with PHP4.4.x, MySQL4.0.x on my production boxes and doing development mostly on PHP-5.2.x and MySQL5.0.x.
Fortunately it seems like Phorum itself is not as vulnerable to changes in PHP itself as other apps because of its NON-OO-code and up to now we had always MySQL4 in mind as it was the requirement for Phorum-5.1 which is the current stable version.

Somewhen I’ll run into walls, thats for sure …

… another blog from one of these web-guys.
Whats a web-guy? I see it more as developers active in the web-community or something like that or do you think thats something else?

Actually it was Brian who brought me to blogging and wordpress alltogether and therefore that title … ;).

At first, let me introduce myself:
Thomas Seifert from Berlin, Germany.
One of the three main-developers of Phorum.
My own project / “company” is MySnip.de which is also the cause why I ended up as Phorum-Developer as I’m using Phorum as the base application for the forum-hosting done there.
Other projects? Hmm, fotoii.com is one of them but there isn’t much traffic yet.
As you can see, all my web-projects are currently build with on PHP and MySQL and usually on Linux.
I know, there are a lot of other combinations possible but PHP/MySQL is IMHO the best combination ever.
You don’t have to worry about licensing costs when you start a project (just had that problem with a work project I’m involved in) and PHP allows for really rapid development and not coding weeks before seeing any result. MySQL is another problem though. Yeah, its fast and lean but it has changed much over the last couple of years (more about thatin another blog post later).

So finally we are all back at home and at least I got the cold with all that flying around ;).

I guess its time now to tell a little bit more about how it went.

The exhibition hall itself, where we’ve shown and talked about Phorum, was open for just 2 days, tuesday and wednesday. We had a lot of people coming to our booth asking about phorum, what it could do, what it should do and what we are doing with dogs ;).
The most requested “feature” was easy user-integration for own systems.
Seems like we, or at least I, really underestimated that need.
I’d say around 50% of all people asking about Phorum were also asking for that feature.
Therefore I guess there wil be really some work put into it and I think Brian already does some work on it.
Isn’t it Brian?

On the other hand we mostly used the time to stick together and get some stuff done on phorum.
Its really much easier to implement changes which might need discussions if you can just talk to each other about it instead of writing on irc or emails.
As you can see from the timeline ( http://www.phorum.org/tracfcgi/timeline ) and closed tickets ( http://www.phorum.org/tracfcgi/query?status=closed&milestone=5.2.0 ) there was quite some work done on 5.2, much more than I expected.

Just some (not complete at all) things that were done:
- large changes in search allowing searching for threads only and author and message text together (!)
- rewritten building of the threaded-list from a recursive function to an optimized non-recursive function which is more than 10 times faster(!)
- printable version of pages was finally put into emerald too
- banlist caching was implemented
- forum path is now built in the admin for easier functionality of the breadcrumbs navigation(s)
- modules can require a minimum phorum version now
- bugs in rss-feed script were fixed
- diff-like edit tracking was added(!)
- setting for requiring cookies was added
- pm-view doesn’t break anymore with lots of recipients
- first steps for adding api-tests and code coverage analysis were done (3.5% code coverage now ;))
- … lots of other fixes to the code.

I guess Brian and Maurice can add quite some more entries to that list.

Thanks to all users for making this possible and I think we will try to repeat that meeting in a shorter timeframe from now on ;).

Hey folks,

I don’t wanna write much about the interesting talks we had here at the MySQLConf but post two pictures.

The first is right before the exhibition hall opened - you see brian and maurice working hard ;).

http://images.mysnip.de/mysqlconf/SSL20077.JPG

and the second one shows them both talking with a guy from Joomla!

http://images.mysnip.de/mysqlconf/SSL20078.JPG

I guess more pictures will follow later and some information about the talks too.

Edit Maurice: here’s another picture of your three favourite Phorum developers

Happy New Year everyone.

As there were no posts in the developer blog for quite some time I’m trying to post some random thoughts about phorum and what the year 2007 will bring for it.

We’ve all been quite busy and not been working too much on phorum in the last weeks but I hope that’ll change shortly.
For me personally the work-situation will not allow too much phorum-work until late february but I hope that at least Maurice (hopefully refreshed after his vacation ;)) and Brian (after the years end stress) will catch up and drive us forward.

I think we will see a fully refreshed phorum-5.2 with a brand new template, lots of caching (and hopefully more performance through that), many more docs and different doc formats (maurice has been working on that, we currently see additional html and pdf docs) and a lot of other smaller and larger changes and enhancements.
http://www.phorum.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/query?milestone=5.2.0&order=priority

I’m really planning for it to get my own forums to 5.2 too :).

Good luck in 2007.

thomas