Forums!
May 29th, 2005 by Ivo
Over time, I've had several requests to replace the ATK and Achievo mailinglists with a forum.
I used to favor a mailinglist though, mainly for the convenience of receiving everything in my inbox, in other words: not having to visit something on a regular basis.
I still think that is one of the main benefits of a mailinglist, but on the other hand, a forum has a much lower threshold. It's easier to access, and you don't have to subscribe to anything to read it. So last week, I finally took the time to install phpBB (which turned out to be a lot easier than I thought).
Peter suggested to add the RSS syndication plugin to the forum, which was a very good idea. With Firefox's 'live bookmarks' feature, the RSS feed makes keeping track of new postings very easy. But if you use Thunderbird as a mail client, you can even subscribe to the forum RSS feed and turn it into a mail folder. This way, you can read the entire forum as if it were a mailinglist. Everybody happy. 
So now we have forums. The mailinglists will continue to exist for a while, but I've removed the subscription instructions from the site. From now on, the forums will be the main communication method.
One thing I was a bit disappointed about though: phpbb's architecture. I can live with the fact that it's not object oriented (although that would've made extending the software a lot easier), but what I find particularly disturbing is the lack of functions. It's mainly a set of long scripts. Functional decomposition would be a Good Thing to do here.
The architecture makes it hard to maintain. This is reflected in the 'mods' that you can download for phpbb. These are not really plugins, but 'modification instructions' telling you what lines of code to modify. Applying many mods makes maintenance and upgrading difficult, and the forum itself can't apply any restrictions on the installed mods.
Fortunately, the code seems to be good. I've not encountered any bugs, and given the amount if installed phpbb forums, code quality probably isn't an issue.
The administration backend could use some work though. Managing forums and users takes a lot of clicking and is not very RSI-friendly. I'm thinking about contributing an ATK backend for phpBB. atkPhpbbAdmin. If only I had the time...