I've been sick the past week, and have been staying home from work (got a note from a doctor on Saturday). Nothing serious, but it's given me more time to work on this board than I've had since I rejoined the work force Jun2013, 11 months ago.
To review: the forum (board) software is v2.0.22 or so, which was more or less abandoned for v3 about, oh, four or five years ago. However, one of the MODs I installed for v2 has no v3 counterpart, and I have been trying, unsuccessfully, for the past five years to hire a phpBB3 MOD developer to add that MOD's functionality.
Meanwhile, I installed a test version of the latest v3 board software, v3.0.12, and I've been chipping away at that problem myself. I do not write any significant code anymore, haven't for years, and I know next-to-nothing about OOP, which is the current dominant paradigm for coding in several popular high-level languages, among them php, the language of this board.
Years ago I'd looked at the problem and guessed that it would take me about a man-month to code the MOD I need in phpBB3, and I wasn't far off: I think I've done it, and it only took about three man-weeks.
The patches I've written and implemented on the test site, they're not -- probably -- the best way of tackling the problem, but I looked at better, more elegant ways to do it and decided it would take yet another man-week, and left well enough alone.
The solution was about 20 lines of code across three files. Most of that is comments. The rest of the time was trying to understand the OOP php code, and I'm not pretending that I do, only enough to get the job done.
The final product is an non-feature-complete phpBB3 implementation of the phpBB2 MOD "Anchor MOD 1.0.4". That's the must-have MOD that lets us use the bbCodes [anchor], [goto], and [gotopost], that organizes the FAQ (for example) and lets us use non-URL references to other posts (ie reference another post using post ID numbers, instead of URLs). There are hundreds of these references, maybe thousands, in this board's posts, and I couldn't migrate to the newer phpBB3 until I could make them work.
- [anchor] works the same as it always has. Use it to create a anchor point, to point the [goto] tags to.
- [goto] works the same as it always has: point [goto] to an anchor, and a link is created to that anchor. [goto] only works within the same post as the [anchor] it points to. It's kind of limiting that way, and it's probably rarely used here.
- [gotopost] I had to break into two separate bbcodes: [gotopost] and [gotopost2].
- [gotopost] now works only for referring to a different post, not to an [anchor] within that post (it used to do both).
- [gotopost2] is the new, separate bbCode for referring to a specific anchorname within a separate post.
Most of you don't use any of these bbCodes, but I use them a lot, and they needed to work for legacy formatting at the least.
Now, with that hurdle out of the way, I am preparing to actually cut over from the old board to the new one. Exciting times.
One of the most-requested features that the new board software offers built-in, is native file attachments. That means no more having to host your pics elsewhere. The ajax viewer is pretty cool, too. I wish the overall look of the included theme was better, but it can be lived with.
Expect the cut-over sometime soon. I know I've been promising file hosting here for at least seven years, but I think we're really close now.
