PunBB (''PunBulletinBoard'') is a lightweight

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

-based internet discussion board system released under the

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. The project's primary goal is to be a faster, smaller, and less graphic alternative to discussion boards such as

phpBB phpBB is an Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of ''PHP Bulletin Board''. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free and open-source. Features of phpBB include s ...

Invision Power Board Invision Community is a brand of forum software developed in 2002 and originally marketed as Invision Power Board. The current version of the software was written in PHP and uses MySQL for database storage. Invision Power Services (IPS) was ...

, or

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. PunBB was originally designed to output standard

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, with speed and simplicity in mind. Features such as

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, polls, file sharing, and attachments were not originally implemented. However, they have since been released as third-party modifications. PunBB has supported third-party extensions since version 1.3.

History

PunBB was founded by Rickard Andersson as a personal project to create an alternative to either over-featured or too-graphic discussion boards. In August 2003, version 1.0 was released under the

. PunBB was originally known simply as Pun because "a pun is a play on words and that's basically what happens on a bulletin board". The ''BB'' addition stands for ''the bulletin board''. PunBB is available in many languages, including Spanish, Russian, Italian, and many other languages. Languages are created by contributors to the project, languages are not officially made by PunBB. However, they are supported. In 2007 the project's code and rights were sold to Informer Technologies, Inc. The company did not institute any major changes at first other than removing the ability to donate money to the project. In April 2008, Rickard Andersson decided to leave the project due to personal reasons. As a result, some developers followed suit and initiated the development of their

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, known as FluxBB. A few days later the company moved the project from the punbb.org domain to its projects' umbrella domain at punbb.informer.com. Several

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and commercial project discussion boards use PunBB. Until September 2011,

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's Developers were using PunBB to power the

Developer's Forum, where users participated in discussions and could submit bug reports.

Forks

FluxBB

FluxBB is a

of PunBB created by its developers after Andersson left the project in April 2008. The developers felt that forking was necessary to maintain control over the development process without the influence of commercial interests. As with PunBB, it was released under the

. In July 2008, FluxBB was announced as a finalist in

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's 2008 Community Choice Awards in the "Best New Project" category. Originally a continuation of PunBB's 1.3 branch, it was announced in January 2009 that the then-current 1.3 branch would be discontinued and that FluxBB 1.4 would revert to being based on the 1.2 codebase. For FluxBB 1.4, several features were

backport Backporting is the action of taking parts from a newer version of a software system or software component and porting them to an older version of the same software. It forms part of the maintenance step in a software development process, and it is ...

ed from 1.3, including

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support, a new default theme, and the ability to split and merge posts. The extension system, however, was not included. FluxBB 1.5 was released in May 2012. In July 2012 it was announced that FluxBB 2.0, the next major version of the software, would be based on the

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web framework, with existing work ported to the new framework. In 2015, FluxBB's lead developer Franz announced they would merge the project with another forum software named Flarum alongside esoTalk lead developer Toby Zerner. This development caused controversy within the FluxBB community.

References

External links

* {{official website, http://punbb.informer.com/
PunBB at GitHub

FluxBB
Free Internet forum software Free groupware Free software programmed in PHP

History

Forks

FluxBB

See also

References

External links