Londonvasion Part II: The Past and the Future
Marshalrusty has opened the conference and we are moving forward. Acyd Burn is the first presenter and he reviewed the history of phpBB from 1.x to 3.0. He has introduced the entire dev team (except Vic, who is not here) and is now talking about the development process for 3.2 as well as some general process changes. It shoulds like things are going to be more organized and therefore more productive.
When you have a volunteer development team, being organized and efficient has to feel good.
There have been a number of questions from the audience; I think the ability to ask the dev team specific questions about current and future code is really being appreciated by the group here.
3.2 is going to implement memory caching which will extend the file (disk) caching present in 3.0. They are (it sounds like) completely reworking the BBCode system. For example, there will not be any standard BBCode values anymore; everything including the former “standard” codes like bold and so on will be implemented as custom codes, which means that there’s only one process. There will be an option to configure which codes can be nested. That would mean you could enable smileys within the code bbcode, if you really wanted to. Or at least that’s the way I understood it.
One of the very interesting concepts for 3.2 is the new event / trigger system. This was originally a community coding project for 2.x, and I guess was left out of 3.0 for time reasons. But it looks like 3.2 will include it. The system will be composed of three components: a trigger, a condition, and the action. The trigger is what starts the process, the condition is used to test whether some action will be taken, and then the action is, well, what happens.
So this could be used to replace an “Auto Group” MOD, where the trigger is a change in post count, the condition is an increase or decrease above or below a threshold, and the action is to add or remove from a group. Another example was automatically locking a post based on certain keywords present in the subject line. It sounds complicated, but interesting.
A question was just asked as to whether we would be able to add our own triggers, and the answer was positive. So that sounds really interesting. Triggers can also start other triggers, so you could end up with a cascading series of events. That sounds scary. Hopefully they’ll include some sort of stack call limit to prevent a runaway process.
I asked about search, and it seems that the sphinx search engine is close, and would be in 3.2. That will be something that I am very interested to watch.
Acyd is wrapping up, so I will post this and see what’s coming next.