Climbing Olympus
I am of course a bit biased. After all, I have the “valued contributor” rank over there after being the Support Team Leader for years. However, after stepping back from the Support Team some months ago already, I had lost touch a bit with phpBB. For a site I am currently working on, I had plans to base it on phpBB. Now, I could choose to integrate phpBB 2.x, but since that is an old version and phpBB 3.0 (Olympus) is coming in not too long anyway, I decided it would be wiser to use that version to be integrated with this new website. I downloaded the first beta, expecting mostly that which I had already seen back in the days when I still was part of the team. Mainly, of course, it was, but... DAMN! phpBB has done it again. I seem to feel similar to phpBB as a lot of critics felt towards TomTom when the new Go range was released. Both products, though in very different categories, are very similar in the fact that with every new release they do, they innovate, they bring in new products that you simply know will be cloned by the competitors. phpBB has done a great job on their Olympus release. I definitely made a good choice in picking the 3.0 to start working with. Of course, this release also sees the introduction of some features that were available in competing software for quite a while. Especially the nested forum/category system is a long-awaited feature. However, I also see new features that are great and very useful. Think for instance of custom profile fields, Jabber integration, file attachments (another long-awaited feature in phpBB), a seperate configuration panel to turn off certain features to reduce the server load, and one very important thing: A very intuitive Administration Panel. This is maybe the best enhancement from the administrators point of view. The Administration Panel is so much better than the previous panel. Very intuitive, the several tabs, each with their own submenu's, are a much better way to manage your forum than the previous system with a big menu in a seperate frame. For regular users also, the improvements against the previous version are massive. You now have the ability to save drafts of posts for later usage, keep a friends and ignore list, and a much improved user control panel. The moderator control panel for those privileged users is also top! A seperate warning list will keep track of warnings users have received, the moderation queue is easily viewed from the moderation control panel, and reported posts can easily be accessed and managed from this central interface. And yes, I know, quite a few of the above listed features are available in other forum packages. But I have never encountered any packages as user friendly and intuitive with such a wide user base and helpful community as phpBB. I am sure this is partially bias and personal preference, but the huge user base does not lie: phpBB is popular, and is good enough to be equipped by thousands upon thousands ^ of website administrators out there, with millions of users worldwide. And they're doing it again. Olympus will be a smashing success once it hits the first stable release! ^ no research done on the actual amount of users. It might be tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. But I am sure there are at least thousands upon thousands of users
posted on July 12, 2006 - 0 comment(s) - tags: phpBB
