I thought it would be a good idea for our budding developers if I put together an introductory tour of the code in m2f 2.0. It will make things easier for you in the early stages, and act as a point of reference which we can all refer to in the future.

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Probably binding mailing lists and forums is a pretty old idea, but the first time it shed some light on phpBB was thanks to an original idea by “danyblue” from the phpBB forum (Thread here). Yes, actually this took place on 2002!!

For some conceptual and personal reasons danyblue continued his work on his own on a separate project called CM2F, now CM4F, which is intended for use in portal software such as phpnuke and its variants (Check out his site).

Some months passed and Patricio D. Anguita (Pda0) took reigns of the project and eventually, with the help of a small dev-test-idea crew, got out a working stable release called M2F 1.0.0 as a phpBB 2.0.x mod (Thread here) in March 2005. This was a fully-functional but light-featured version that did the basic job.

Later on, George Crawford (GeorgeC) took up the task to upgrade the code until we got the latest v1.x stable release (As of 2007, M2F v1.2.6), a feature-rich release that boasted full phpBB integration, including attachment support, moderation panel, and a lot of other nice goodies.

Funny thing is, lots of users are happy with this phpBB MOD, but it never got approved by the phpBB moderators because it didn’t follow MOD guideliness too well… damn

Well, that about sum it up. Happy m2f’ing!

.pd

Hi again!

So, for this, the first real post in our new Development Blog, I’d like to fill you in on what I’ve been up to PHP-wise in recent weeks.

Alpha 3 was released about 12 weeks ago (Jan 23rd). It was the first release of v2.0 that had really started to look like a useful application, with phpBB integration working in some respects (albeit missing some features and a bit buggy). However, soon after the alpha was released I kind of hit a brick wall with my coding. I kept coming up against problems with the OOP nature of my design that I couldn’t overcome, and I was starting to make some bad decisions to avoid them.

So, although it sounds crazy just as Alpha 3 was showing signs of promise, I actually went right back to the drawing board. Not in terms of overall design of the project (channels, chains, filters - these are all still very much in the picture), but the actual way I describe the classes in PHP. It is by no means starting again - basically I am copying the old Alpha 3 code and pasting into a new, better-designed framework for the application.

The main problem I was up against was that I had developed an enormous tree-like structure of inherited classes. As a fairly inexperienced OOP-based programmer, I made some fundamental mistakes in how I approached Inheritance and Composition. It meant that the whole codebase was tied together in terms of dependence, and any changes to one part would affect another.

So, in reorganising the code, I’ve been much more disciplined in certain areas to ensure I don’t get caught out again. Let me explain a few of my design philosophies.

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Hello!

A very warm welcome to the m2f Development Team’s new blog. We have set this up primarily as a means to keep you updated on our progress, but also to explain and explore some of the design concepts and decisions we have been working on.

Pda0 and I will endeavour to post here fairly frequently, so why not subscribe to the RSS feed to receive instant updates?

Remember, during the Alpha/Beta development phase, you can join in group discussions by emailing to beta@mail2forum.com. Bugs, Issues and Feature Requests should be posted to the tracker at http://mail2forum.com/issues/.