phpBB 3.1 Ascraeus
Over 1k bug fixes, 1.5k improvements & 11k commits.
Administrators
Features, changes and improvements
Extensions
Manually editing code is a thing of the past. Quickly installed in the ACP, extensions are to phpBB 3.1 what MODs were to phpBB 2.0 & 3.0. Our huge customisation community is hard at work building new extensions to help you get the most out of your forum.
Unmatched Security
Nothing is more important than keeping your data safe, and our record speaks for itself. In the past four years, there have been no reported vulnerabilities in the phpBB software. Meanwhile SMF, vBulletin, IPB, and MyBB have had an average of 10, and as many as 16. That's an average of 10 more reasons to choose phpBB. And just to make sure, we hired a professional security company to audit the entire phpBB 3.1 codebase.
Simplified Updating
If you're tired of complicated updating procedures, you'll love phpBB 3.1. Whether it's extensions or phpBB itself, updating is as simple as uploading the new package and clicking a few buttons. You can even check to make sure you're running the latest versions, right in the ACP.
Soft Delete
Posts and topics can now be removed from public view without being permanently deleted. You can determine this behaviour per user or group.
Improved Global Announcements
Global announcements are now tied to a specific forum, greatly simplifying permissions.
Improved Teams Page
The new teams page is highly customisable and sorted by groups.
Contact Page
Visitors, including guests, can now get in touch with the board administrator by using the built-in contact page.
End Users
Features, changes and improvements
Responsive Theme
Our default style, prosilver, has been completely overhauled to ensure a modern experience on all of your devices. Give it a try on a tablet or smart-phone.
Notification System
Easily configure how you prefer to be notified about various events, such as when you are quoted in a post. The new extensible notifications feature lives in the header of every page and provides a centralized place to receive alerts and other information.
Gravatar Support
Avatars may now be fetched from the Gravatar service, in addition to the previously available options.
OAuth Login
Register and login using your Google, Bit.ly, or Facebook accounts. Extensions can easily add other authentication services.
Developers
Features, changes and improvements
Symfony Components
Symfony provides a set of battle-hardened components for developing websites with PHP. These components are widely used as the foundation of web applications in the PHP world including several popular projects like Drupal or Laravel. phpBB is now also built using Symfony.
Routing & Controllers
phpBB is now designed following the more modern web MVC construct using Routes and Controllers in order to provide better API calls.
Migrations
Migrations have been added to simplify maintaining database states based on the installation and removal of features and extensions.
Dependency Injection
New and refactored code now consistently follows the Dependency Injection design pattern.
Composer
We now rely on Composer for dependency management. You can find phpBB's Composer package on Packagist.
Functional Testing
In addition to unit testing with PHPUnit, phpBB now ensures its correct behaviour with functional testing.
Designers
Features, changes and improvements
AJAX
Traditionally with phpBB, even simple operations like deleting a post or reordering forums have involved multiple requests and full page loads, which was slow and heavy on bandwidth. We've added AJAX functionality to a lot of these simple operations, making them faster and easier to do.
Improved Style Inheritance
The templating system has been completely overhauled. The folder structure has been cleaned up, providing an increased ability to inherit from the other styles. No more unnecessary and confusing configuration files!
Improved Navigation
Redesigned and laid out to provide better UX/UI. The addition of menus to group similar functionality. Improved consistency across the design. Completely reworked buttons leveraging CSS rather than images.
HTML5 & CSS3 Enhancements
We're now using the HTML5 doctype and CSS3 to modernize the codebase, reduce the number of requests made to the server, and speed up page load times.
Twig Templating Engine
You can now leverage the power of Twig Templating with your styles.
jQuery
Leverage jQuery for your extensions and styles. We use it ourselves (mostly for the new AJAX functionality).