I will admit that I’ve never understood the need for having more than one style. To me if you are setting up a board as part of a site, or as the entire site, then you want your board style (template) to match your site. And unless you’re going to allow a user (or visitor) to change the style of your entire site, why would you bother?

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I have a client that is struggling to survive on the server that they are currently using. I have suggested (more than once) that a new host be considered, as their current host is a single cpu running php in cgi mode.

Is this a bad thing? Yes!

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It was recently pointed out to me that there is another phpBB-related podcast being produced. This one is hosted by webmacster87 aka Fountain of Apples via the Talk Shoe hosting service. Here’s a link:

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=12418

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This is the first in a planned series of posts where I will share some principals of good database design. Many MOD authors are good at coding php, and some are even comfortable with sql. But a good database design can make or break your project, and it’s not a skill that is taught in programming classes. Getting the database design right the first time can certainly can make coding and performance tuning easier. This first post is going to explain the purpose of something called an Associative table relationship. We even have a couple of those in phpBB.

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I have added some code to my blog that will display the five most recent comments in the right side panel. It should work fine. Should. If you encounter any strange behavior, please let me know.

This is for those of you that – like me – don’t subscribe to any sort of feed process. I just want to be able to go to a blog, read the new posts, and read new comments even if they’re on old posts. So this feature is primarily for me. Hopefully some of you might find this useful as well.

I see a lot of posts at phpbb.com. In my role as a moderator I’m assigned to a few specific forums, but when I have time I spend time in other areas as well. One of the more popular posts recently has been how to add to a board. That’s not a problem… except when the person posting the question is using one of the many “free” phpBB hosts that have popped up over the past several years.

I blame Google. Why? Read on to find out.

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The last time I tried to upgrade Wordpress was an unmitigated disastor. Going to try again. If you experience weirdness in the next day or so it’s probably because I’m working through the upgrade process.

This is part IV of a series of posts about the phpBB2 search process. Previous posts include:

• Part I: Table Review
• Part II: Making Effective Use of “Stop Words”
• Part III: Efficient clean_words() Function

You don’t have to read all of the prior parts in order to read this one. The last post was quite long, and so part of what I wanted to cover there was postponed until this post. In this post I’m going to analyze what one particular regex (regular expression) from the clean_words() function is doing. In very early versions of phpBB2 it worked very well at keeping short and long words out of your search index tables. In later versions it did not work so well. In this post I will explain why, and provide an extremely easy fix.

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This is part three of a series of posts about how the search process in phpBB works. In prior posts I have talked about the search table design and how to use stopwords. This post is going to describe how to roll back to code found way back in version 2.0.4 for one specific line. If you don’t implement this change you might see short words (two or fewer letters) or long words (greater than 20 letters) in your search database. This post also details a few additional tweaks that I have made to the clean_words() function found in includes/search_functions.php that help overall performance, both in posting and in searching. All of the changes I discuss in this post are available in MOD format. This is a bit of a long post, but stay with me, I think it’s worth it.

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