Why, it's another phpBB subversion!

I woke up today, and saw in the oh-so-awesome phpBB administration panel that version 2.0.19, "we wish you all a happy new year", has been released, and guess what? It fixes even MORE security holes! Jesus Christ! When is this going to end? I'm sick of having to upgrade manually all my files, because my board is already heavily modified.

This wouldn't happen if phpBB was actually built with security and modularity in mind! I can't believe new exploits are always found. It's just insane how shitty the phpBB coders are. I know, they work for free, and give their time and sweat so people like me can run websites for significantly less, but why is this piece of shit the #1 used forum software?

Enough ranting. For those of you who care: I've finally gotten my new monitor, and i'ts awesome! I currently am unable to start work on r3b1rth (lmao) because I have gotten an offer to work on another project, and it's at max priority right now. I'll be done January 7th, so check back later!

Stupid comments

Whoever keeps posting comments such as "Lets have a baby, baby." or "I want to fuck you up the ass.", just stop. You're really not clever, nor funny. You really must have no life to think you're even remotely funny or cool posting things like that.

To those who are wondering what I'm doing: Right now I'm waiting to get my new 20.1" monitor to start work on r3b1rth. I currently have a shitty 15" monitor, and I hate the tiny amount of code I can see with it. I'll have a dual monitor set up, it will speed up development. Right now I've finished my project manager (well, a really basic project manager actually). I'll also get to skinning this Blog whenever I finish the r3b1rth skin, to have matching designs. How awesome.

Codename: r3b1rth

All big projects have a cool code name. I've always wanted this project to be called rebirth, but be written in a cool, hip way. LeekLock found r3b1rth which I think looks totally awesome.

So now, if you need to quickly reference to this project, just talk about r3b1rth. Nobody cares, nor do I think anyone is reading this. Oh well, my life is nothing but failure :(

Project management, here I come!

When you take on such a big project, it's a good idea to have a project manager, even if you're working alone. For those who know me, you'll know I'm usually not fond of premade shit. You guessed it: I'm making a minimalistic project manager. It'll be more of a "automatic date inserter" and line counter than an actual project manager. But, yeah, I guess it might help in some cases where I forget when the last time I've worked on a file was.

Also, as soon as I finish the project manager, I'm going to create http://beta.locklegion.com which will be an active version of the developping forums, for bug testing and other things, including random stats like total line numbers, files amount, and hours spent working. You know, shit like that.

Wow, I am slowly starting to realize nobody will give a flying fuck about this blog. In case you're wondering why the fuck you should read this, well, here is a good reason: You'll learn from my mistakes. I'm probably going to bump into a lot of problems when making this. I'll probably have to start things from scratch over, and over, and over again. I think it's a good idea to regularly follow this, so you'll also get an idea of how much work it is to entirely recode a website that already consists of a good 10-20'000 lines of code (I never counted them. I'll count them as soon as I finish my tool which should be in a few hours).

EDIT: I ran a line counter I made, and I'd say there's a good 40'000 lines of code. I'm saying this as an estimation, because there are some files on my server that aren't really part of the forum or the website itself. I also have accidental uploads on there.

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.