MyBB 2.0 – MyBB for Business

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.

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

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

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 2.0 design demonstration on Video

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

MyBB is NOT a community driven project

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.

MyBB license changes from GPL to the BSD-3 license with MyBB 2.0

Yesterday MyBB development team member Euan T announced a license change for MyBB 2.0. MyBB 2.0 will no longer be released under the Lesser GNU Public License Version 3 (LGPL3) like MyBB 1.8 but instead be released under the BSD 3 Clause (BSD-3) license.

The license is still open source and will probably allow MyBB to be used even more often, however there are the following limitations:

You cannot use the MyBB Group trademark or the names, trademarks or logos of any of the project’s contributors.
The MyBB Group cannot be held liable for any damages caused by the software.
The original copyright must be retained.

The last point is not clearly defined by the developers yet. For MyBB 1.6 and MyBB 1.8, users were allowed to remove the visible copyright with the backlink to MyBB.com. But if they did, they did not get support in the MyBB.com community forums.

I don’t think that this will change with the usage of the BSD-3 license, but you should be aware of the new license situation and check if there are any issues using MyBB for your business under the new license.