PHPbb team : you have to catch up with the compition

[Elf]

The most important that the forum was very functional and reliable! I very much would like (and not only me) that it was possible to change each parameter as in vB. I read the Russian forums devoted phpBB much. Someone praises this forum, and someone speaks, that phpBB has lagged behind a life and is obsolete, because of weak functionality! But all without exception praise php - code!!! I very much hope, that phpBB 2.2 can compete and will surpass vB3 and IPB!

[Roberdin]

I - and many others, no doubt - just want to say thanks for all your effort, and won't hold you to a release date.

No, I'm not gonna make a joke here. ( 8O )

[NarGemini]

Only one thing to say:

If you think it's bad having to wait for phpBB 2.2, be glad you aren't still waiting for 1st Page XP (http://www.evrsoft.com). At least here there are committed developers who truly care about putting out a great product for the betterment of the Internet community as a whole.

EDIT:

Oops, one more thing. I was one of those "when will it be out?" people once. Then I got flamed, or, to put it more nicely, "my thread was locked." Just don't ask, and it will come eventually.

[cyberCrank]

Early on I reviewed the various "competition" at the time we "chose" phpBB. We "chose" phpBB because we like it better than the competition for various reasons (some of which are personal and some "professional", i.e., functionality, modularity, quality, adaptability, forum support, etc.).

In all of life we do many things and often are required to "choose" from a variety of options. Sometimes we make bad "choices" and sometimes we make good "choices"; we live and die by our "choices" and sometimes we live to regret some "choices" we make. Having "chosen" phpBB, I have no doubt it was and is a good choice for us and for the intended purpose and it still serves the bill nicely and am grateful and thankful for having this "choice" made available and possible by the phpBB developers. I like the old adage and premise that something good is worth waiting for and feel that phpBB 2.2 will be good, will be worth waiting for, and will be another good "choice" for us.

Although this thread is like a roller coaster going through it, it was fun; and many thanks to the phpBB dev team for providing us with such a good choice! When 2.2 comes it will be like a refreshing "spring shower".

** spring is such a great time with all the new growth and new flowers expected **

[Anjayis]

Phew!
That was a lot of reading - I read the majority of pages, but skimmed over 6 through 8 because it talked about stuff about vBulletin and so on - and believe it or not, I'm still planning to watch a film even though it's 10:20pm here! 8O

I personally like phpBB a lot, I was not too keen on it prior to phpBB2 however at phpBB2 I started using it and now solely use it; in fact, I cannot imagine using another forum board I've grown to like it soo much.

I don't care for the fact the developers are taking a long time to develop it, I simply like the fact it works for me, it's fast and also it's free. I admit, I don't mind shelling out the money for a forum board as I have just shelled out £100 for books on Linux and now since I'm going to do my MEng in Software Engineering have to shell out £200 or so on more books - but the thing is, those other forum boards like vBulletin and such, I find, are not as good as phpBB.

It's really all personal choice. Same with Linux, many people love either SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, Lindows, LFS, Lycoris and various others. Each Linux is just as good as the next - in theory, or at least they are all Linux and none are Windows (funny... now I like using Linux and so on and say at least it's not Windows ... but after my MEng I'll probably find myself working for Microsoft coding some of their products due to the fact they have some very good after-graduation plans giving good pay and so on which I plan to inquire about).

Anyway - Just because vBulletin or IPB has more releases or more features than phpBB, it does not mean they are better. phpBB has an elegance about it, which makes it different. It's like comparing Gnome, KDE and XFCE - I think out of KDE and Gnome that KDE is the better of the two due to graphics, however I do believe at the same time that XFCE is the best out of them all as I find it a more elegant desktop than KDE or Gnome. Like in the Linux world, people all use their preferred distro and they all use their preferred desktop with their preferred window manager, in the forum world - each person can use their preferred forum board.

Basically, making a very long story short - I don't mind the fact the phpBB developers are taking a long time to code this. Think how hard it is for us software engineers to program in C and C++, it takes a long time to program a good stable program... like someone else said here, look at Windows ME.
Many different programs are not done well and therefore are very buggy... some of you may play a PC game called Anno 1503 or 1503 A.D. for the Americans, when it came out first in Germany, it had many many bugs and only when they released the international versions did they fix it up. There again - it was coded in a hurry and therefore turned out very buggy.

I am very glad that the phpBB developers are taking their time and are trying their best at making phpBB stable. Just look at how unstable Windows is... and the truth be told that's all the Windows, not only ME (I can just imagine - if I ever worked for Microsoft programming something - them telling me to program very badly and have holes and bugs everywhere, haha).

I think those say that phpBB is taking too slow need to really take a step back. Do you really want this to turn into Windows ME or Windows XP? Do you really want this to turn into Lindows? (Lindows, it may be Linux - so they say - but it sure is buggy.)

I can just foresee in the future, when phpBB v2.2 is released while all the others have "more features" and are at higher development numbers... that phpBB will be the only reliable and stable forum board available because the developers took their time to turn phpBB into something good.

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

(I do not recall saying 2.2 would be out last year AJD).

Sorry, you didn't. It was a certain support team member who shall remain unnamed. It was a guess on his part.

[sparkster]

Thanks for the post psoTFX, and thanks for providing great software for us all and I understand that phpBB has to take a back seat sometimes, been in a similar situation before myself

Since everyone seems to be posting why they like phpBB so much, I'll add my 2c. The reason I like phpBB so much is because it's fairly stable, such a huge userbase, but mainly because the code is fantastic. The phpBB dev team write the easiest-to-understand PHP code I think I've ever seen come out of an open source project. This makes my life customising boards so much easier as I don't have to use messy hacks other produce, it's just so easy to make whatever changes you want yourself. Everything from removing the screen after posting to synchronising user-inputted WONIDs in a phpBB database with an online Counter-Strike server for real-time stats in the postbit, it's so easy to do and I think I've done it.

Again, thanks for the great project

[ICY]

I have to say i believe that the reason that vb3 and invison 2 are being pushed out the door and ranted about so much as of late is because they are afraid of the phpBB bonnet so they are trying to entice the users into there products specifically aiming at they're crowds but reaching out to those waiting for phpBB2.2 (my 2 cents anyway)

[dhn]

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming-- or buying software-- on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.

[Techie-Micheal]

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming-- or buying software-- on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.

Nice quote.