PHP Programming Language - Cultural View

phpBB 230
socialise with members of the phpBB teams. The event also represented the first time that most members of the
teams had a chance to meet each other in person.
The phpBB teams underwent numerous changes in 2009. On January 1, the teams formally ended support for
phpBB2. [23] Many of the non-development teams released betas and release candidates of side projects during this
time. The first beta of AutoMOD, an automatic installer of phpBB MODifications, was released by the MOD Team
on December 22, 2008. [24] The first release candidate of the Unified MOD Install Library (UMIL), a framework for
allowing MOD authors to design simple database installation scripts, was released by the MOD Team on January 12,
2009. [25] The first release candidate of the Support Toolkit, a package of tools to diagnose and fix common
support-related issues with phpBB, was released by the Support Team on June 24. [26]
On June 10, 2009. the phpBB Development Team broke with their precedent of keeping future development plans
under wraps and publicly previewed a series of new features that would be coming in phpBB 3.0.6. [27] After four RC
releases, phpBB 3.0.6 was released on November 17. [28] The most notable new features included a bare-bones quick
reply editor (a feature which the teams had historically been firmly opposed to), support for ACM (cache) plugins,
ATOM feed support, and a plugin-based CAPTCHA system, including built-in support for reCAPTCHA among
others. The modularization of phpBB's CAPTCHA also provided an API for MOD authors to write CAPTCHA
plugins, allowing for greater diversification of the CAPTCHAs used in phpBB installations. The MOD Team also
ran a competition to encourage CAPTCHA plugin development. [29]
On July 29, 2009, the Development Team announced "significant changes" to the phpBB's development process and
release cycle. [30] Chief among these was the decision to abandon the former Linux kernel versioning scheme,
meaning that whether part of the version number was even or odd no longer was significant. As such, Ascraeus (the
successor to 3.0.0 Olympus) is to become phpBB 3.1.0. (The original versioning scheme dictated that 3.1.x would be
a development branch, meaning that Ascraeus would have been released as 3.2.0.) Subsequent feature releases of
phpBB3 will be versioned as 3.2.0, 3.3.0, etc. phpBB 4.0.0 will represent a fundamentally redesigned version of
phpBB. The strategy also committed the teams to continue supporting an older "stable" branch for at least 6–9
months after a newer "feature" branch was released. However, an exception was made for 3.0.6 which was already in
development. Although it contained enough significant new features that it could have been considered a 3.1.0
release, it remained a part of the 3.0.x branch, which also meant that the teams did not have to simultaneously
continue supporting 3.0.5 after 3.0.6's release.
In January 2010, Meik Sievertsen stepped down as Lead Developer, instead taking on the roles of developer and
"Server Manager". Nils Adermann was then promoted to Lead Developer.