Lowter

PunBB 1.3 Officially Released!

Published on the 9th of November 2008

By Ethan Poole

PunBB 1.3 has finally been officially released just today! This release brings tons of improvements from 1.2, particularly the new extension system. Here is a small list of improvements (from the official news post (external link)):

• Extension system based on hooking technique. One click extension installation, no need to modify forum's code anymore.
• Full UTF-8 support.
• More customisable styles, templating system.
• New layout: markup, CSS, language files updated, markup helper functions added.
• URL rewriting schemes, nice URL's built-in.
• Split/merge topics functionality.
• Multiple groups for moderators allowed.
• Searches are now case-insensitive, extern.php improved, more global, per-group and per-user options added.
• Certain "bad" characters are silently stripped out from the text input.
• Got rid of extras folder, README added.
• Hotifx system based on extension system for quick bugfixes.

Since the start of PunBB 1.3's development, the project has also undergone a change in ownership as Rickard Andersson (external link), the lead developer, moved on to new things. The code base has improved a lot as well, although I guess that isn't as exciting of an issue with the hook-based extension system.

Personally, I like the new default layout. It's much more slick than the old one and a nice facelift.

Lowter will probably upgrade our PunBB installation in the coming weeks, for anyone wondering. You can download (external link) the official release of PunBB 1.3 from the PunBB website.

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