Complete Forum Overhaul

So, I’m sure you have noticed that our forums doesn’t look at all like it did before. We finally made the switch. We originally used PHPBB2, after hearing that the mods section will be closed down, we upgraded to PHPBB3. I had hoped that it really was a one click convert process, but unfortunately for me, my workload probably went up a billion times because of all the times I messed with the MySQL databases.

Anyways, asides from the technical mumbo jumbo I’ll add at the end, I thought it might be interesting to see the screenshots I went through to give you the new forums. Of course, there were many minor changes from the quick edit box to the multiple versions of RSS feeds that I tried to implement (yet none of them worked).

Source: http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r98/PharaohsVizier/Miscellaneous%20DSDatabase/forum1.jpg

So, this is a picture of the start, classic DSDatabase forums, tons of mods installed, highly dated version of PHPBB, but fully suitable for our needs. Good memories.

Source: http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r98/PharaohsVizier/Miscellaneous%20DSDatabase/forum2.jpg

Quite convert brings me to a hugely broken forum (sorry, this screenshot was taken after I fixed a lot of things), board completely down, search engine broken, and the topics were just placed randomly in whatever subforum they wanted.

Source: http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r98/PharaohsVizier/Miscellaneous%20DSDatabase/forum3.jpg

Decided that the forum looked to similar to the old one, changed to the default PHPBB3 skin, reinstalling all the mods on a completely new theme, pretty irritated. Most bugs fixed, new random posts being generated by PHPBB3 forums, administrative panel an utter mess, somehow a few of the moderators got demoted (once again picture wasn’t taken at the time). Still, happy with the look and feel of the new forum, definitely worth it.

Source: http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r98/PharaohsVizier/Miscellaneous%20DSDatabase/forum4.jpg

me_too_lazy and I decided that the forum theme we were using was used to death, of course it was an easy call for him because I would do all the work. Went checking out new themes, finally decided on this one, and of course, I completely forgot, every time I change skins, I have to redo the mods. Yay! It gets even better, when I tried to enter the administrator’s control panel, it seems I got demoted big time, couldn’t access anything. I had to wait for me_too_lazy to upgrade me to moderator so that I could access a few of the necessary controls to promote me back to administrator. Of course, the “new” forum isn’t quite complete yet, we don’t even have our own logo, but that will soon change, over the next few days, we will be updating it regularly with fixes and hopefully it will be completely bug free.

So I REALLY hope you guys like the new forum, I put a lot of effort into it, it was kind of a spur of the moment thing, wasn’t all that planned, it came to me a few days ago that we should upgrade. I got everything set up, chosen everything, then hit all the errors.

REMEMBER, IF ANYONE SEES ANY ERRORS ON THE FORUM, EMAIL ME AT PHARAOHSVIZIER@GMAIL.COM. I WILL TRY TO FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

OK, now for the technical stuff. If anyone has any experiences with PHPBB3 styles and mods, or are good with html for the actual site, and would like to help, it would be very much appreciated.

Having a great time doing these things, it seems that the last server move was pretty damaging to the forums because all the databases were a little screwed, not to mention my “backups” for some reason weren’t backups anymore. Just a warning to others who are making websites, don’t use Fantastico in your CPanel to install PHPBB (or some of the other scripts), it turns out they modify things and basically some of the PHPBB folders and files weren’t in the right place, I wasn’t able to upgrade, or install, etc. It was really quite a horrible ordeal, pretty much all of the problems I encountered was due to server moves and fantastico.

Once again, if there are any errors or you can’t view the page, etc, I absolutely need to know about it, I won’t keep the old forum as a backup for long, so things may be irreversible if you hold your tongue.

Thanks,
PharaohsVizier