MyBB 2.0 requires PHP 7 as minimum version

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.

Official MyBB Blog expired and is not accessible at the moment

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:

MyBB Blog Expired

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!

Scam warning for MyBB plugin developers

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:

Continue reading Scam warning for MyBB plugin developers

MyBB 1.8.7 brings security and maintenance updates

The MyBB development team released a new version of MyBB 1.8. MyBB 1.8.7 is a maintenance and security update. It does fix 13 security vulnerabilities and 83 reported issues of MyBB 1.8.6.
Beside a lot of low-risk XSS injections, a possible SQL Injection in the moderation tool has been fixed which is declared as medium risk.

You should update your MyBB forum as soon as possible to include these security fixes.

If you are upgrading from MyBB 1.8.6 you can use the changed file package for the upgrade to 1.8.7. Do not forget to make backups first and run the update script after you replaced your old files with the new ones!

You can find the update descriptions on the official MyBB blog.

You should always keep your MyBB at the newest version to prevent hackers from getting access to your forums files and data. If there are security updates you should always update your forum as soon as possible.

This has been the first update that was not released for MyBB 1.6 too, because the support period for MyBB 1.6 has ended. I do expect that MyBB 1.6 does still carry the same security issues as 1.8.6 does. If you are still using MyBB 1.6 it’s the final call to update to 1.8 now.

Translate your MyBB forum in more languages

If you have great topics in your forum, you should get visitors from many countries, even if they do not speak the main forum language. I’ll talk about a proper multilanguage setup of your forum in this blog post.

One of the advantages of MyBB is the amount of languages available for the forum software. Continue reading Translate your MyBB forum in more languages

Speed up MyBB on IIS installations

If you do run MyBB on a Windows Server with the built-in IIS webserver you might notice that MyBB is slower on IIS installations than on Apache.

The reason is in the database connection of the default installation of MyBB. The default value for the database server is localhost which is correct for most installations. On IIS, setting localhost as database server will cause a DNS lookup in the system. This DNS lookup takes some time and slows down your MyBB on every single database connection start.

The lookup can be prevented which saves you up to two seconds on each pageload if you do not set localhost as database server but use the IP of the database server. In most cases, you’ll have the database on the same – local – server and the IP will be 127.0.0.1.

Continue reading Speed up MyBB on IIS installations

MyBB 2.0 Source Code has been released

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.

MyBB 1.6 is no longer supported

As I announced before in this post, the MyBB team decided to drop the support for MyBB 1.6.

Since MyBB 1.8 has been released more than one year ago, this is a very valid decision. If you are still using MyBB 1.6 you should really upgrade to MyBB 1.8 now because you’d risk security issues otherwise.

If there are plugins that have not yet been updated to MyBB 1.8 compatibility they’ll probably never will and you should drop them.