A new phpBB update is upon us.  Its name is 3.0.6 and it is available here.  There are quite a few improvements and updates, the most notable being a better spam filtering captcha system, the inclusion of a quick reply pane as a default option, a better caching system to improve overall speed performance and a better automatic upgrade script.

Now the (very) painful upgrade process can begin, hopefully for the last time before benefitting from the enhanced upgrade script.

I will also soon release revised versions of the forum templates.

The new release candidate of AutoMOD for phpBB3 has finally been released.

One of the common problems with phpbb is that the forum design expands in width when users post images that are too wide for the forum. Here are two fixes to this problem.

There is a fairly advanced mod for phpbb3 that allows you to apply an automatic image resize in forum posts, together with an optional lightbox. You can find it here.

For those of you who are interested in a less advanced solution, here is a little hack that will automatically resize all posted images down to a width of 550px wide.

Preview

With this hack, images that are too large to fit, like this:

are automatically resized in a size that fits, like this one:

Download

Download the file from here.

A useful tip for webmasters:

Click to Play

A useful tip for webmasters:

Click to Play

Well, not exactly automated phpbb software upgrades, but at least an easy way to install mods, like easymod used to work under phpbb2. It’s called automod and you can download it here.

Download it now

The phpbb forum software has now been updated to version 3.0.4. Get it here.

Templates designed for 3.0.3 will also work under 3.0.4.

The templates for the phpbb3 forum software are available here.

These are phpbb3 ports of Mike Lothar’s Ad Infinitum, Conundrum, Nosebleed, AI2, CND2 and NB2.

Get it over at phpBB • Downloads. I’ll be working on a new version of the forum templates.