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Don't spread FUD.
Sourceforge offers release trackers which the phpBB team openly point people to if they want mail updates:
http://sourceforge.net/project/filemodule_monitor. php?filemodule_id=28882
Or of course, there is the RSS feed :
http://www.phpbb.com/rss.php
And, after 'popular demand' they are currently working on a special security mailing list that people can subscribe to.

Here are details on the actual problem with a fix.

They do NOT have any mailing lists for people to subscribe to, so that they can be informed when a new version of phpBB2 has been released.

Every thread on the subject, that I found on their site, had been locked. It appears that the moderators do not like their users complaining about a lack of a security announcement mailing list.

Actually, it doesn't have to do with unpatched phpBB installations. It has to do with unpatched PHP installations.

phpBB has an explanation of what the problem is, it can be found at:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=24 8046

OTHER FORUMS ARE VULNERABLE

(and no, I am not a phpBB zealot, I am pointing out a misconception)

First of all, the exploit is in PHP (see here), not phpBB, the worm just happens to attack phpBB. I just think that should be cleared up before people start spreading FUD about how phpBB is insecure.

Secondly, this issue has been patched for a month now (see this announcement) and the phpBB group has reminded users several times to upgrade.

It looks like the latest phpBB version 2.0.11 or a simple patch will thwart the worm, though. Time to upgrade if you haven't yet!

It looks like the latest phpBB version 2.0.11 or a simple patch will thwart the worm, though. Time to upgrade if you haven't yet!

I'm just playing with the demo now, (this is the URL btw). It suffers from the same ol' syndrome of "very functional," looks like ass.

Now, my own design skills are somewhat limited. I can't make a snappy graphic-filled website without a lot of work (as my own demonstrates, my graphics are blah at the moment) - but even I can see that this needs a remodelling job. Default colour scheme is blahhh.

Look at slashdot... yes some of the schemes are hard on the eyes but overall it's not too bad.

Look at some other sites for an example of basic but friendly colours, Less cluttered interface, and layouts with many options but good organization

..yet they can't even update their phpBB to the latest version

Well, here's an example:

XMB [eXtreme Message Board] - URL

Originally began under a BSD license. Developers quit. New guy, Richard, took over and changed the license without consulting anyone to a proprietary license for 1.6. No previous developers were consulted regarding the change. New branches started from the 1.5 source, since it was BSD, but any attempts to release the code were met with legal threats from Richard and Aventure Media . The only notable exception is previous developers started their own forum from the 1.5 code but it went no where. No one has ever defied Aventure Media and released a competing project based off earlier code for fear of legal costs. This is a free forum -- no profit is made. No one can afford to have a legal battle over it, so they move on. (Which is why XMB is losing developers and is fading away, especially in comparison to other superior forum projects [like this].)

Changing the license is probably illegal, but Richard argued that the code was submitted to XMB as a project, and thus was property of whomever ran the project, which was now him. Is this right? Probably not. Can anyone do anything about it? Not without spending money on a product that makes no money. When a project manager screws around with things like licensing, it's best to walk away.

Check phpBB (open source, free, very popular) or vBulletin (also excellent, but commercial).

phpBB

I've used it many of times to host forums, here are a couple examples:

Knight Time Media Forum

The Everdead Message Board

I used to use GeekLog for my personal site, and it worked pretty good. I've since moved to a combination of phpBB, and an addon for it called phpBB_Fetch_All.

The advantage of using phpBB is you can easily expand your site into a larger community or something in the future.

It depends on your application.

For example, a template engine is used in phpBB (as with many message board systems). There's a lot of very dynamic and conditional content on message boards, and I honestly can't see how XHTML and CSS can effectively handle it.

By abstracting the markup from the data, you can also simplify the markup. For example, if you are generating a table with an unknown number of rows, you can define a single row in your template and the engine will duplicate it as required. Same thing if you even have multiple tables of multiple rows.

Personally, I think phpBB's engine is a little overboard, but it's like that to be more flexible than the boards I maintain require. For example, I don't see the need to a separate language file for anything I do (although I understand it's usefulness). Similarly, I don't really care for the style table it generates in code from the database (although this makes changing the styles easier via web interface). So to save overhead I remove these features and just put the data directly into the templates.

What I'm really getting at is: Use the right tool for the job. PHP Template engines are a Good Thing(tm) but definately not the Only Thing(tm)
=Smidge=

phpBB 2.2 has a great, fast templating/styling system that's vaguely a hybrid of phpLib and Smarty. Not stable yet, but worth remembering for the future.

Your arguments are great but they apply for almost every lanugage I know of.

As for frameworks look at apache. Have you seen how many frameworks it has for java? What about Swing, AWT, SWT etc? Just because they're are lots of frame works doesn't mean it bad.

I agree with your class as a static function library but that's not PHP's fault. C++, Java and Perl have the same problem. When people learn C or VB first and then go to an OO langauge they generally get it wrong.

As for bad projects I sure if you did an "Ask Slashdot" they'd be able to tell you about bad projects C, C++, Lisp, PHP, Java, J2EE, .NET, etc.

As for a standard was of seperating logic from content lots of people say that JSP isn't enough that's why you have stuff like Velocity and all the other framework template engines. If you want a template engine for php the default one is Smarty.

When it come down to it the problem you have with PHP is that it has a lot of newbie programers that use it. Which is good and bad. Try making a simple form in JSP then do the same thing in PHP. PHP is ALOT easier. That doesn't mean it's better but it does mean people with a lower skill can do it. I'm using templates for our internal site and when other people edit it half the time the escape and got back to raw PHP and it's a mess so I fix it up and it's all clean again but they just don't get it untill after I show them then it make sense and they can do it but the next time they can't figure it out so it happens again etc.

Does it mean you get lots of bad half baked libraries YES does it mean you get good libraries and frameworks YES (because more poeple start, so more people get good at it).

If you want to look at good php projects check out:
* Smarty
* Mambo
* Gallery
* phpBB
* JpGraph
* phpMyAdmin

That being said at what level do you move someone from a "HTML + PHP Hack" to a "Web Developer"?

What makes a lanuage "enterprise-ready"? Does an "enterprise" company just have to use it (IE Yahoo and PHP). Or does it have to have faetures?

Where I work we still use PROC and PIC which is a 40 year old language that doesn't have:
* Variable Names - Only numbers!
* Functions - Only GOTO and GO SUB (again numbers no names)
* All variables are global!
* No loops!
* No else - You have to use IF and GOTO!

Yet this is still being used in thousands of companies all over the world! Sure it's legacy but it's enterprise ready and still being used!

So could it be used on a massive site handling 1,000 of concurrent users? Yes, IF IT WAS DESIGNED IN THE RIGHT WAY. It wouldn't be the same design as you'd use for .NET or the same as you'd use for J2EE but it would work. It might not be the best but that depends on the problem. (Same as Clusters vs Grid)

I've ranted engough ... have fun pulling my comments to peices.

You'll probably lose ranking if the non-google-UA bot that checks up on this sees different content
Surprisingly Google has thought of this (and I'm guessing most other engines). It will not complain if the link points to the same page with different GET variables (removing SID), as long as the actual text is the same.

Your directory idea is basically how the PHPBB modification does it, except it is a unique HTML name for each thread instead of a unique directory. For some odd reason, google will still follow links to both a folder or file with different GET variables (although not consistantly). You have to use robots.txt to block the get variables (which is made easier when the same page has different names depending if it uses GET variables).

How PHPBB does it

Not only do I not have to pay some ridiculous percentage of my profits, but I am 0 steps away from my users.

Put up a decent website with a way of getting feedback from your users (I use the excellent and free phpBB message board). This can also help create a community around your product. If you listen to what they say then your game will get better and better. Another thing that I have done is try to optimize my website for certain google searches.

I can't imagine any paid distributor putting as much thought and effort into such things for one of a hundred small games they are dealing with. By doing it myself I am confident that it is being done well.

Doing this I have seen my game grow from nothing into a steady stream of sales. I'm glad I did it the way I did, rather then trying to go the easy way and get some other company to do it. See my sig for a link to my game's website, which includes a user forum and an online ranking system.

A while back, I experimented with several CMS packages. PHPNuke and PostNuke weren't appropriate for my needs, so I ruled those out immediately. I tried Grey Matter, and was pleased with its simplicity and flexibility. However, at the time it didn't come with templates (it may now; I don't know), which meant it was really only appropriate for people who wanted to design their website's look and feel from scratch.

Movable Type was next. I liked MT's interface, which was very slick. However, it stored everything in binary files which, in my personal experience, became corrupted easily. Poof, no more blog. (I believe MT now has the ability to store posts in a MySQL database, which would make it easier to backup/restore website content.)

In the end, I (and my users) went with PHPbb. It struck me as the "middle road" choice between GreyMatter and Movable Type. It has a lightweight GUI interface which lets you get in there and work under the hood if you want, or ignore all the techie stuff and just post your stories. Since it's written in PHP, it's also a simple matter to get in there and hack up the code to your liking.

I haven't had any issues or complaints in about a year and a half of running five PHPbb sites. Caveat, though: from what I've heard, installation can be tricky if you don't have root access to your server.

PhpBB, you mean ?

Well, you could try setting up a forum. I'd go for that in favour of your standard weblog (not that a forum can't be made into a weblog).
Setting up a forum allows you to create different areas, with diferent themes. It could also be interesting that users could pick their own avatars, theme, and you can set static user titles, titles by post count, etc.

phpBB is incredibly easy to setup. If you have a running DB (MySQL, PgSQL, whatever), instalation is is a snap. I suggest you take a look at it. Visit their Community Forums for an example.

Other software you could take a peek at:
OpenBB - another great forum system
Course forum - never tried it, looks good

I've also used InvisionBB, which I don't know the URL offhand.

As I understand them, weblog programs are designed to allow one person to post an article, and then other people to comment on it. I do not think this is well suited to what you want to do, because 1) you will have multiple people posting multiple works, 2) you will probably not want to allow comments from random strangers. Using weblogs, each student would need to have his or her own weblog, which would make it more difficult for collaborative use of the type you envision.

For these purposes, a forum would be much better; forums allow for multiple, separate discussions to take place in a centralized area. They also allow the forum administrator to lock down the forum in such a way that only members can post messages, and the administrator gets to say who can be a member. This would help keep the discussion on topic. Each student's work would go in a different thread -- say Sally M. Haverforth posts the first draft of her argumentative essay on Milton's treatment of women in a thread called "S. Haverforth -- Milton: Masochistic Misogynist?". Subsequent comments from her peers would be replies to that initial posting, keeping the whole thing neatly organized.

If you have access to an appropriately equipped server, I recommend phpBB for the job: it's easy to set up and administer, open source, free of charge, and fairly easy to use.

The phpBB Community Forum is an example of the software in use, if you want to get an idea of its capabilities. All open source. I'm not involved with the project, just a happy user. :-)

The phpBB Community Forum is an example of the software in use, if you want to get an idea of its capabilities. All open source. I'm not involved with the project, just a happy user. :-)

Check out PHPbb, it allows for multiple admins and groups, not sure if it's exactly what you need, but if not I'm sure with a few extra lines of PHP you could get it to do what you need! Good luck!

(This is like a throwback to the user-group days of old when we actually used green-screen BBS's on 2400 bps modems... but sometimes the oldies are goodies.)

XDG

Set yourself up with a webserver with httpd, irc, a maillist server, and a newserver. Then you have what is equivalent to webct. You can even get around the newserver by using a discussion board.

You will need to deal with security issues if you want your students to be able to check grades online. There are other security issues as well. I've been on a few maillists that got signed up to pr0n lists. This weren't webct lists though. Since webct uses a webmail type interface where only other members of the class can send mail to.

So, the question to ask yourself is: What will cost you more? Getting some monkey to set up standard software for you or shelling out some cash so that WebCT can set up proprietary software for you. Don't forget the maintainence costs.

If I were you and I'd have the IT department at your school set everything up for you. Use http for all the general stuff. Let people post questions to a discussion board. And hold tutorials over irc. Use the maillist for announcements.

Your just missing it. :) I missed them a lot too before I found them.

ADODB for PHP is a good abstraction layer (some people think it is too bloated and the code is ugly, of course those people haven't written their own or anything)

The PearDB
functions are very useful as well.

I've heard that the phpBB DB layer is very good but I haven't looked at it myself or tried to use it in other programs.

Personally, I haven't found anything in PHP to be short-sighted. I've programmed ASP, JSP, and even some Perl and I've found PHP to be the best all around language for server side web scripting.

MySQL, ehhhh....my opinion is they should change their slogan to "MySQL - Hey, it's better than using a flat file!" :) (which is not meant to denegrate all of the volunteers that have put in a lot of hard work creating MySQL, for simple web sites and applications I don't think it can be beat. But Oracle, IBM, and MS don't have anything to fear from it)

I run a online game development business (www.murpe.com) where most of my development and support team are found all around the world (England, India, Russia, Japan), so we had to look at a common place for having meetings and discussions. There are times my adminitrative staff cannot connect to our online games (due to firewall restricts on telnet), so using web interfaces was an option we considered.

Since we are primary an linux-run development business, we found that using phpBB's (www.phpBB.com) web board system we could keep things private and moderated, then we also utilized a few web based project management suites (you can find these through freshmeat.net easier) for delegating tasks and having a calender available to everyone for upcoming milestone meetings and what not. Overall, the web boards/suites allow us near real-time interaction for discussing issues and for working on other problems when they arise.

-- M