Phorum - PHP Community Conference

Phorum
The ﬁrst PHP/MySQL message board

Brian Moon
Senior Web Engineer - dealnews.com
http://brian.moonspot.net/
@brianlmoon

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Why am I on stage?
• I wrote PHP/FI code
• I wrote for msql (not mysql)
• I wrote Perl CGI scripts
• Wrote mysql_fetch_assoc()
• Wrote a core PHP function that has
been deprecated

(bottom line? I am an old man in PHP years!)

Rasmus Lerdorf
“PHP began life as a simple little CGI wrapper written in Perl. I wrote it in an afternoon during a
period between contracts when I needed a quick tool to get an idea of who was reading my online
resume. It was never intended to go beyond my own private use. The web server where I had my
resume was extremely overloaded and had constant problems forking processes. I rewrote the Perl
wrapper in C to get rid of the considerable overhead of having to fork Perl each time my resume was
accessed.”

http://www.php.net/manual/phpﬁ2.php#history


1998


Message Boards Sucked


Community

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/michaelsphotos/127987110


New Hotness


Evolution
• Store messages in MySQL
• Support Paging
• Search Messages
• Use a block layout

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/brentdanley/2205021283


Accidental Open Source
• Offered to the PHP General
list
• Help me debug and you can
have the source
• 10 bug reports in the ﬁrst day,
rolled to deal-mac.com in 3
days.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/rrenomeron/85825614/


Open Source
• Started with no license
• Switched to GPL in 1998 sometime
• During 1999 Apachecon, heard a
talk on GPL vs. Apache license.
Changed to the Apache license in Vs.

the hotel room that night
• Phorum License is a BSD license
Ben Ramsey

today http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/maistora/5017939764

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mikeschinkel/424276070


Open Source
• 50+ contributors over the years
• Many are still friends even though
they are not active on Phorum
• 3 core developers over the last 5 or Vs.

so years
• Power users more prevalent in our
support forums now Ben Ramsey

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/maistora/5017939764

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mikeschinkel/424276070


Failures

• Evolutionary, not
revolutionary
• v1 lacked moderation, web
based conﬁguration, user
accounts, more
• Tailored for deal-mac largely
in the early years


Successes
• Performance was always a top priority
• Code sanity
• Utilized the database well
• Hook and Module system
• Real threading of messages
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/alltheaces/4158804332


Diverging from mainstream
• Shunned OOP in PHP4 for Phorum 5
• Wrote our own template system. Smarty was only
months old at the time + it was OOP
• Wrote our own database layer. Never seen a good
one, including PDO
• Uses a “no framework”
framework
http://moonspot.net/rasmus-php-mvc

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/conorkeller/4455479137


Market Share Quality over quantity

* Hired creator of another product and
switched to that and is now on phpBB

"powered by phorum" returns 5+ million results on google
"powered by phpbb" returns 32+ million results on google


Status
• Phorum 5.2 is the current
release. It is in maintenance
status.
• Major work being done in Maurice Makaay

Phorum 5.3 to make the
application more developer
friendly.
• Phorum 6?
Thomas Seifert


Future of message boards
• Needs another revolution
• Last revolution was UBB,
everything else has just evolved
their model
• Focus on less categorization and
more about getting people what
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/arfried/186159147

they want to see
• Do it as distributed software, not
as a service

Phorum - PHP Community Conference

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