Brian was kind enough to review both of his presentations which go in to great detail about the scaling issues he's faced both with DealNews.com and the Phorum forum software project (which recently turned 10 years old!) [...] Thanks to Brian for going over things in such detail!

You can download this latest episode from the WebDevRadio site as well as check out Brian's slides from his MySQL conference presentation.

So, I am at the MySQL Conference this week with my Phorum co-developers. We got to talking last night about how old Phorum is. We knew it was about 10 years. We pulled up some old archived zip file of version 1.5 and found in the this in the comment block. "* Created 04/16/1998" Whoa! That means that yesterday was the 10th birthday of the Phorum project.

The current version of Phorum is 5.2 stable and can be downloaded directly from their site.

When we officially started on 5.2 in March of 2006, we had several goals. I think we achieved most of those. We also accomplished some unplanned things. Our hackathon (me and maurice slept about 8 hours in 4 days I think) at MySQL Conference 2007 helped a lot. Remember, you can help us get there again by donating to our fund.

Updates include a new template for the forum, new PAI layers and more hooks to call them, better MySQL support, improved bundled modules, a new announcement system and a new, restructured search functionality.

If out more about the release here and more about the Phorum software here.

Now, most people will say you should never do this. And lots of time they are right. And once upon a time I agreed with them without question. Then I started living in the real world where sometimes you have to do things you never thought you would. Here are the two places where I stores files in a database.

His places are in Phorum, using the method to keep the system's database and file attachments contained and easier to move around, and in the replication of their databases, making it simple to have images for the deals on dealnews transferable to the various slave databases.

Yes! Its here! Phorum 5.2 has reached alpha status. Its been over a year since we branched the 5.1 code and started on 5.2. A lot has changed and Phorum is better for it. Much of the success of Phorum 5.2 goes to Maurice Makaay. He has done a lot of work to make the core code cleaner and easier for module developers. He has also been instrumental in the documentation project. As for new features and changes, below are a few. We are still updating a wiki page with all the changes and features at http://www.phorum.org/development/wiki/Phorum52News.

Updates for the users and admins include:

• Brand new template. Emerald is a more modern, full featured template. It uses many interface design recommendation used by usability professionals.
• Better error messages when posting to help your users know what is wrong.
• New announcement module that gets announcements out of the message list and into a more prominent position.
• More modules included with Phorum and officially supported.
• Sanity checks updated to help admins know if their Phorum is running properly.

Topics covered in this issue include:

• Building Ning Apps - by David Sklar
• a look at SimpleXML in PHP - by Thomas Myer
• Code Generation Techniques - by Jon Ramsey
• "Navigating the maze of Phorum" - by Brent Knigge, Boulos Mansour and Andy Cachia
• and a spotlight on KINKY, an application framework with over 300 modules

You can check out the full detailed table of contents for every article in the issue, or just hop on over and puchase the issue today - a single issue only costs around $5.00 USD.]]> Tue, 07 Feb 2006 07:03:14 -0600