Need for plugin and theme architecture....

[number3nl]

After running phpBB for over 4 years I just wanted to put it out there. I love phpBB for the great community, wonderful features, great development that has been going on for the last couple of years now....

In installing MODs over the years I have yelled at the codebase (doesnot help, but it made me feel better), because of all the edits I had to do on the Styles. With EasyMod and now AutoMod it gets better. But it still seems to have toooo much coupling between styles, mods and the core code base.

Now I recently started to work on a Wordpress implementation... YEEEHAAAA, plugin's and themes and widgets with no effort installement, with "auto" update features, styles that can be "edited" without the need of "FTP clients" and notepad+..... yes, it can be done with PHP as welll...

So this make me wonder why phpBB does not have this after all these years. Still I find myself tuning the theme's when modding the features. If you work on anything for the 3.1 or 4.0 releases it should be the plugin/theme architecture. And ease of use, you will get a bigger fanbase if you get people to just click and drag and drop a forum....

And integrating with Twitter, Hyves, OpenID, Facebook, etc. are needed, but a plugin architecture should come first...

[stickerboy]

There's already talk about this for 4.0.x - have a read through some of the topics in the 4.0.x discussion forums:
viewforum.php?f=75