phpbb3 and myff portals

[admin (no pm's please)]

Much to my surprise a LATEST portal is now doing something, not everything and not the same as our current LATEST portal, but it is a good start


_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

Anther observation on portals is that even though some portals like the gallery would be easy to include as they stand independent of the forums system, they will not always be included in the phpbb3 system.

The philosophy here is to cut back to what clearly is useful. e.g. the quiz, the webpages, the shop, some search type portals and many others will be there, but anything where if we were starting from scratch on phpbb3 we would have done differently will be scrapped.

I see no gains in backwards compatibility for the sake of it. going to phpbb3 is a big enough change as it is, it is best to make as clean a start as we can.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

I may easily be wrong, but it looks to me like there is a bit of a bug in the phpbb3 template caching system.

The checks on cache date are based on the file time, which does not work when as will be the case the templates are stored when edited in the database. In practice this may be hidden as when the template is edited it may also be cached, hence in no normal situation would an issue arise.

But that does not mean it is not a bug.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

Okay,

Basic display of latest posts, and latest topics portals are now live.

I may leave that at that point for now.

There are issues with whether the way the portals worked on forums was sensible, and the idea of setting global "portal" forums was never one that I thought really worked.

So I think we prune back to the roots and do something better.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

Quiz portal seems to be done.

Next is the shop portal, which is the biggest challenge as we need to integrate with phpbb3s equivilent of XPROFILE fields.

This may be a problem as our XPROFILE fields are I think more powerful and flexible than phpbb3, but at this stage I do not want to be changing phpbb3s fields.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

The shop is now displaying  but not processing orders, one notable glitch is that the shop template relied on one of the extra macros we have always got defined in myff templates like USER_ID, this was not passed into phpbb3 templates.

There is going to be backwards compatibility issues here for some templates I am sure. As whilst USER_ID was not there at all, and has been put in, phpbb3 does have macros that cover some of the additional macros we have put in, and I see no gain in duplicating the macros. It would be a performance hit for all time, and that is not acceptable.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

Have just managed to buy something from the shop which is good

Had to manually give myself CASH to do it... which is bad

This is a general quandary at the moment, there is a phpbb3 cash mod in development, here in phpbb2 we did roll our own powerful portal based system.

Do we:

1) Stick our portal system in. It is powerful and more general.
2) Go for the phpbb3 cash mod.
3) Wait and see.


Actually I think this may be a no brainer.  Portals have proved their worth and are the basis of ongoing development of powerful features, and I think we should stick with them.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums