PHPBuilder.com has posted a comparison of three PHP forums (the software to run them) - vBulletin, phpBB and Kunena.

In the past few years, there has been a great increase in the number of websites with user-generated content (UGC). One of the most common Web applications with UGC is a Web forum -- a place where people can share their impressions and opinions on different topics. As forum software is becoming more and more popular, I will compare the three best forum software products written in PHP: vBulletin, phpBB and Kunena.

They go through each of them and talk about what features they offer and some of the pros and cons of each. At the end of the post there's a table laying out each of these in a bit more easy to reference form.

Stefan Koopmanschap has an excellent new post to his blog about some of the ideas and contributions he's made to help the phpBB community move closer to their goal move to the Symfony framework.

At the conference it was announced that phpBB was considering moving to a Symfony basis for their upcoming version 4. Since then, an RFC was posted and given the schedule for the Libertyvasion conference organized by phpBB, they're gearing up to dive deep into Symfony. This article reflects the thoughts I've offered at the Libertyvasion Conference on the combining of powers of phpBB and Symfony.

He talks some about each community, what they're all about and how this coming together might effect each side. He does list a some of the positive side effects of this collaboration - things like more skilled developers, providing a good solid use case for the framework and easier integration of the forum into a pre-existing site. He also includes a few ways for those interested to help out with the project.

Josh Holmes has a new post to his blog today about the inclusion of a new piece of software into Microsoft's Web Application Gallery - phpBB, the popular forum software.

Well, it's official '" the phpBB package has been finished, tested and accepted into the Web Application Gallery. You can see the official announcement on the Microsoft Web Platform blog. That means that you can install phpBB on Windows through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which gives you a very simple wizard to walk through.

With the Platform Installer, handling most of the dependencies is all done for you and installing this very popular application onto your site or local machine is just a few clicks away. This phpBB install requires that you use PHP 5.2.13 and SQL Server. This package was pulled together by a group at the JumpIn Camp that happened recently.

There's a new post on Lukas Smith's blog where he talks about frameworks, phpBB's decision and building "gold on top of crap".

See the various symfony CMS solutions are an example of how wrong things can go. We now have several solutions whose architectural differences are either cosmetic or simply bad design decisions probably a result of trying to invent things in the small ecosystem of a company project team. So I was very happy to hear then that phpBB will adopt Symfony 2 for their next version. Hopefully this will become a role model for others.

He talks about how several of the popular CMS systems these days have worked harder on their external functionality than on the base (where they need the most work). He also looks towards a future where there are good, solid CMS solutions and leaders will emerge from the pack and provide quality content management for the PHP masses.

There's also some great discussion in the comments of the post with people who both share and disagree with some of Lukas' thoughts.

In response to an announcement made by the phpBB group at the just-passed Symfony Live event about considerations being made to change the base platform to Symfony, Stefan Koopmanschap has posted an open letter to the phpBB community and development group with his thoughts on the potential move.

The past week was the week of Symfony Live 2010 in Paris. One of the people there was Nils Adermann, the new Lead Developer of the phpBB project. The biggest news was that phpBB is considering moving to Symfony 2 as the basis of their new version of phpBB: phpBB4.

There's an RFC posted for anyone that would like to reply back to the idea. In Stefan's response he mentions things that would be positive about the decision like not having to reinvent the wheel, getting the support of the pre-established Symfony community, making it easier to extend phpBB via Symfony code and a certain sense of security that comes with having the framework backing.

For those that might have missed it, the phpBB.com server was hacked via an unpatched version of another piece of PHP software running on the same machine. Stefan Koopmanschap has posted a bit about it and talks about what happened and what can be learned from it.

Yesterday the phpBB.com server got hacked. People who, like me, were there back in the days of phpBB2 will be reminded of the security flaws found in the software back then. However, this was not the cause of this hack. It was an unpatched version of another PHP package that caused the hack, which exposed amongst other things the full user database and several server passwords.

The problem was with an unpatched version of phpList, a mailing list manager, that allowed the hacker to get in and get out with a complete dump of the users table (including passwords and other private information).

I think the whole world can learn something from this: Your server is only as secure as your weakest link. So if you use any third party open source software, make sure that you always use the latest version, and that you subscribe to notification mailinglists of new releases. This will ensure that you get notified when new versions are released, so that you can patch your installation to the latest version and fix any vulnerabilities in the software.

Among other things mentioned in his his latest post Bill Staples talks about a new tool that makes the installation of lots of popular web apps (PHP and not) simpler - the Microsoft Web Application Installer.

The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

According to the CyberInsecure.com website around a half-million websites running PHPBB were hacked in a large coordinated effort.

More than half a million websites have been compromised in a new round of attacks that hacked domains in order to infect unsuspecting users' PCs with a variety of trojans. This ongoing campaign includes new malware hosting domains and new trojans variations. All of the sites are running older or misconfigured versions of "phpBB," an open-source message forum manager. Open-source popular applications like phpBB tend to be often targeted by mass scanning and exploiting tools.

The hack redirected visitors through several steps ultimately ending up on a page that tried to take advantage of errors in older Internet Explorer and RealPlayer versions. The article talks about exactly which viruses could have caused the problems and the wide range of sites (both in topic and location) that were effected.

The best way to protect you and your PHPBB install from something like this happening is to get the latest version of the software and learn how to configure it correctly.

The phpBB development team have released an announcement about a new podcast that the application's developers will be creating.

We are now live after much discussion and work internally with the first episode of the Official phpBB Podcast!

The first episode has been posted to the official podcast website and includes talk of browser cookies, COPA vs COPPA, jaber support, PHP5 support and board/category/forum/subforum differences.

You cna check out this latest podcast in this post or subscribe to their feed (either normally or in iTunes) to get this and future episodes.

On his blog, Stoyan Stefanov takes a look at using on of the most popular pieces of PHP forum software out there - phpBB - and optimizing the front-end.

During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we'll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will continue to work normally. As an example, I'll use the bgcanada.com/phpBB2, the board I volunteer to administrate.

The tutorial is broken up into sections:

• The plan
• New subdomains
• Creating a new template
• Moving CSS to an external file, merging
• Copying files to the new subdomains
• Serving gzipped content
• Turning ETags off
• Expires header
• Sysadmin summary

It looks like a lot of steps, but each section is relatively short and written well so as not to have more information than needed. In the end you'll have a simple template that uses Yahoo's 14 optimization rules to make things work that much faster.