Welcome to this blog

I hate phpBB. I hate the way it's built, I hate the way it tries to be too compatible with billions of databases and PHP versions, and most of all, I hate its insecurity.

Sure, we all make mistakes when we code, but I think that when these people wrote phpBB, they weren't thinking about security. They were too focused on compatibility with PHP 3 (which isn't even used anymore).

That's why I've decided to code my own forum software. This blog will cover the entire coding process, from the base design and idea, to the final stage. This is a solo project and I won't be publishing the source. This forum software will only run on my website, http://www.locklegion.com

This forum software will be written in complete Object-Oriented PHP. That is, there will be a topic class, a post class, etc, to make it much easier to develop other pages. I'll be able to use the topic class to fetch topic information in one single function call, instead of always writing out the query. I'll also make an advanced templating system. Faster and neater than the one phpBB users. It will obviously cache old template files. phpBB has always bothered me with its numerous ACP features that are completely useless for "advanced" administrators. When you want to change something about a user in phpBB, for example, you always have to go through the admin panel. And the fact that they added Admin re-login before going in the ACP doesn't help. That's why I already made a few shortcuts on my site, by modding phpBB. But I'm quite sick of phpBB's frame-based admin panel. There are much better ways to handle an admin panel.

Did I mention that I hate the way phpBB lets USERS choose their own language for the board? How useless is that anyways? If that wasn't stupid enough, phpBB's handling of languages is just terrible. Having to type an entire $lang['thing'] = 'aaa' for a single word is a huge waste of time. Languages should be handled with a special parsed file format that, once ran through a script, is converted to actual PHP.

phpBB's default template: subSilver, is coded like crap. They actually used spaces instead of tabs to indent the HTML. How fucked up is that? They also have tons of stupid useless alt and title tags for all images. phpBB is just way too bloated with crap. It has a lot of features I never use. Also, if you look at how it actually handle usergroups, you'll shoot yourself in the head 4 times with a shotgun. Each member is part of its own group. This is stupid. Incredibly stupid.

Wish me luck with this. I'll keep you updated on my progress and hopefully I can finish this thing.