So I learned something tonight… had something pointed out to me that I’ve never noticed in all the years I’ve been working with phpBB. Seems that admin control panel (ACP) menu entries are supposed to be language variables. Even though there’s no $lang[] anywhere visible.

My Search Flood Controls MOD was rejected. One of the reasons given was that there was no language entry for the menu item. Well, phooey, I said to myself, none of the standard phpBB admin pages do either. If you’ve never looked at how the menu entries are created, the code looks like this:

if( !empty($setmodules) )
{
        $file = basename(__FILE__);
        $module['phpBBDoctor']['Search Control] = $file;
        return;
}

What you end up seeing in your ACP is a menu section named “phpBBDoctor” and a menu entry named “Search Control”. And it seems to come straight from the text. Without doing anything special, I had a new menu item named “Search Control” on my phpBBDoctor menu section. Cool, huh? Seems that it was also an accident. The code is written so that it looks for a language string stored as $lang['Search Control'] and if it doesn’t find it, it uses the string (key) instead. But the expected behavior is that there would be a language entry. Even though it does not actually reference the $lang[] array, it seems.

So kudos go to MarkTheDaemon, the MOD Validator that caught this issue for me, as I’ve had other MODs reviewed (and either approved or rejected) but nobody has ever caught this before. The language entries for the standard phpBB menu items are all found at the very top of language/lang_english/lang_admin.php, if you are curious.

He also suggested that I needed a language string for “phpBBDoctor” but I think I can argue that one. You would not require a language string for google, would you?

Oh, and the best part about this? It’s highly possible that my Page Permissions MOD will once again get rejected, as it doesn’t use language entries for the ACP menu items either.

Related Links

• Creating a new Admin Page by Graham@phpbb.com