The Energon Pub

News Credits: 3600 · by **Seibertron** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 10:08 am

As some of you know, I am in the process of basically rewriting the phpBB forums to suit our needs on the site. I officially started the reprogramming of the actual pages that make up the forums last Monday. Progress is coming along great in my opinion. I've discovered several areas in phpBB that are detrimental to the site's performance. I've also figured out some betters ways to do what phpBB does. Since I'm about knee-deep in reprogramming phpBB, I'm becoming more and more familiar with the inner workings of the phpBB codebase, which has enabled me to fix a few problems that have recently cropped up during the past 6 weeks after I launched the new registration process.

2 of the issues that I have addressed involved the "Who's Online" code as well as the code that displays who's viewing a forum. I made a couple of small adjustments to imrpove the queries and PHP that displays these two sets of results.

The third issue involved the error that you guys were seeing during the day related to the sessions table being full. I *think* I have corrected this issue for the time being. We shall see if the changes I made ultimately resolved this problem or not.

Some people have questioned why I'm "reinventing the wheel" so to speak. phpBB has a variety of limitations as well as a variety of performance related issues. I will tackle these issues and concerns by rebuilding the forums using my code base instead. I'm a programmer by profession so taking apart the phpBB codebase is a learning experience, as it is any time that I rewrite other people's code. People who love to take apart computers or cars or other mechanical or electrical devices will understand my desire to take apart the phpBB code.

Much of the end result will ultimately look the same to you guys. I'm not looking to reinvent the interface that has served this site so well for the past 5 years. Much of what will be changed are things behind the scenes which will ultimately provide us with a faster forum system that is fully integrated into the site. The end goal for me is to be able to easily modify the forum system to meet the growing needs of the site's staff as well as the community.

I will keep you guys posted as things progress as well as when there will be a DEMO version for you guys to see. I essentially pushed out the new registration process which created a domino effect of problems. I hope that by giving the staff and the community a DEMO area to play with will help us eliminate some of these potential problems.

I know things have been buggy during the past 6 weeks. I'm sorry for any inconveniences it has caused you. I know it can be very frustrating to lose data or posts. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't feel that there was a better outcome to be had to suit all of our needs better. Thank you for your continued patience.