MyBB 1.8.33 is now available, and is a security & maintenance release.
This version improves cache system stability, and compatibility with PostgreSQL (PDO) and recent PHP versions.
A high risk security vulnerability has been addressed too, updating is urgently required.
The MyBB Team has officially released MyBB 1.8.32, the latest version of the popular open-source forum software. This update continues the 1.8 series tradition of focusing on security, stability, and community-driven improvements. Whether you’re a forum administrator, theme designer, or plugin developer, there are key changes in this release worth noting.
As with all releases in the 1.8 branch, security is a top priority. MyBB 1.8.32 includes several security hardening improvements to protect forums against common web vulnerabilities. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to benefit from these improvements, even if their current installation appears secure.
A lot of shared webhosts are currently migrating from PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6. PHP 7 is fairly new, web software is slowly adapted to support the new standard – mostly beside supporting old standards like PHP 5.6.
The MyBB team announced that MyBB 2.0 will no longer support the PHP 5.X series. The minimum PHP version required to run MyBB 2.0 will be PHP 7.
PHP 7 is faster and more secure and brings up some nice new features, the MyBB devs want to use. But PHP 7 is not that widespread at the moment. A lot of PHP extensions like Imagick or Ioncube have not yet been stable updated to PHP 7 and a lot of webhosters have only installed the core PHP 7 version for advertisement reasons.
It’ll take some time until MyBB 2.0 will be released – we still expect some alpha, beta and rc versions before. But if MyBB 2.0 will be ready, you should have a webhost supporting PHP 7. If you are using other web software with MyBB, make sure it’ll be updated for PHP 7 too.
The official MyBB blog at blog.mybb.com is expired. It looks like the wordpress hosting has not been paid and therefor the blog is now offline. If you are trying to visit the official MyBB blog, you’ll get the following message:
We informed the MyBB staff about this issue. Hopefully they’ll restore the blog soon. Let’s hope that this was just an accident and does not reveal difficulties in the MyBB staff or project. The official community forums and the website itself is still online.
Update: The blog is back online!
There is a new scam method being used since January 2016. New users with fresh accounts and very little posts are showing up in the official MyBB community forums or contacting MyBB plugin authors directly.
They are looking for custom plugins and promise to pay money above average prices for the plugins. They do accept the usual process in this case: The plugin is developed and the plugin author does provide a testforum based on MyBB to test the plugins abilities by the customer. After that, the coder is being paid and the plugin is delivered.
The new scam method has been reported by two plugin authors already and looks like this:
The MyBB 2.0 source code has been released in the official github repository.
It’s still at an early stage, the MyBB core team does not call it alpha yet. You should not use this version in production as it does contain bugs and breaking changes will probably be made until the MyBB 2.0 release candidate is published.
If you want to dive into the source code of the new, laravel based, MyBB 2.0, you can do it here in the official repository. Be aware that no support is offered for 2.0 yet and only experienced developers and plugin coders should work with this version.
To install the current state of MyBB 2.0 you’ll first need a Homestead environment with mybb2.dev pointing to /home/vagrant/Code/mybb2/public.
If you have setup the environment you can clone the git repository and install the dependencies using composer.
The full installation process is described in detail here.
The MyBB team released three videos to show off some of the new MyBB 2.0 design on different devices.
They follow a responsive webdesign approach like most modern websites do. Even some MyBB 1.8 forums do have a responsive design which works on any device.
I think that this design will be pretty close to the alpha and beta design of MyBB 2.0 so you should look at it.
Get a first sneak preview of MyBB 2.0 here.
Continue reading MyBB 2.0 design demonstration on Video
The MyBB development team released further information about the new MyBB 2.0 version at the official blog. Beside small features like the ability to directly quote parts of existing posts, there have been two good announcements. The MyBB profile fields will receive a huge update. Admins will be able to group these input fields and use different input types on these fields like selects, texts or textareas and special fields like URLs or email. It’s not clear if they’ll be stored in fitting types in the database (like Pimcore does it for example) though. Continue reading MyBB 2.0 receives Profile Field Enhancements and Unit Tests
The MyBB development team added further informations about the development of MyBB 2.0 in a new blog post.
It seems that they listened to the community who asked for more informations about important decisions (I wrote about this topic here). They restructured the official suggestion forums but they are still informing the community lately. The community does still not have any major impact on the developing.
MyBB 2.0 is using SASS during the development process and might be using Sass or LESS for themers later. They try to follow the BEM syntax for the MyBB CSS. MyBB 2.0 will probably use of gulp.js build system to minify and distribute CSS and JS files.
MyBB 2.0 will provide a conversation system instead of the classic single PMs as we already knew. This is a good step which should probably already have been taken with the release of MyBB 1.8. Users will have a threaded look for the PMs, conversations with multiple users or whole usergroups will be possible. Continue reading Further information about the MyBB 2.0 development progress
Recent activities in the MyBB community showed off, that MyBB is not a community driven project. The community is allowed to post suggestions for MyBB 2.0 but the developers are making the major decisions about the future of MyBB without asking the community.
Turns out that MyBB 2.0 will be developed with Laravel 5 and does use Twig as the template engine. The requirements are PHP 5.4 and MySQL 5 or postgresql.
The framework and template engine of MyBB are huge decisions as they have a major influence on the compatible third party components. You could easily integrate a content management system like Pimcore, if MyBB would use the Zend framework. Or integrate a picture gallery built with the Symfony MediaBundle with MyBB 2.0.
Of course this is still possible but it’ll require more effort for the integrating developers.
Especially plugin and theme developers will have to learn the Laravel framework and the twig template engine if they want to continue contributing to the MyBB world. If they decide against the chosen framework, they’ll soon be gone.
You’d have thought that there would’ve been a poll or a public discussion about such huge decisions but there have been none. MyBB development team member Euan T stated that two developers chose the framework when they started working on MyBB 2.0.
While he agrees that the community could have been more involved into the progress, he also states that the developers have no interest in writing blog posts and explaining major development decisions to the community:
A few days ago another major decision has been taken by the MyBB development team without discussion with the community – they’ll switch the license for MyBB 2.0.
You can see that MyBB as open source software is not driven by the community but only supported by the community. Community members are allowed to find bugs and post suggestions but they have nearly no influence on the future of MyBB.
If you are using MyBB for business, you should be aware that major decisions will be taken without asking of informing the community at an early stage.