Although it has been a long road, the Olympus Bug Tracker was officially opened 3 months ago ...and now, the 6th phpBB birthday has come with pretty nice present for us all, the first beta has been released. Can't believe it? Go look yourself! ;-)

• Official Announcement.
• Development page at phpBB.com.
• phpBB Development Board.
• phpBB Teams blogging about it.

It's Beta1, with limited support, with no conversion/upgrade tools yet, but hey, it's Olympus and it's really coming!

Douglas Bell (aka Fountain of Apples) is working on an integration of Akismet with phpBB and he has just finished the first in a series of development phases along a nice introduction on what's all about.

If you're running a phpBB based board, you might want to keep an eye to the development topic of this promising MOD. ;-)

At this time, if you're running a phpBB based board you probably know that phpBB 2.0.21 was released a couple of days ago (if not, you should... hmm... why not subscribe to their mailing list?). Although, it just includes several bug fixes and 2 routines backported from Olympus, one of the fixes is related to a minor security issue with language selection.

If you haven't noticed yet, there was a bug introduced in the new language selection code that is executed when the user data is being populated (function init_userprefs). The package has not been updated, but a patch has been committed to CVS and published next to the release announcement.

Update: the 2.0.21 package has been updated!

Take care and happy patching! ;-)

I've been waiting for about a month, yet I finally got my Google Analytics invitation! If you navigate with MSIE, depending on your browser settings, you may now see an alert similar to this:

If you don't, you probably should (You may want to) read about the latest publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer or any of the recent posts at the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog.
Note: It's been fixed here ;-)

BTW, if you ever need to install the Google Analytics snippet to track your phpBB based board, you may wish to not generate the javascript code when you're logged in as administrator. To do so, you may try the following...

The first time I saw a resizable textarea was using TinyMCE, then I've seen this implemented in WordPress, then in Drupal. After some time, I started to feel consumed by the need to find this feature in other tools that I often use too, such as phpBB... here's where I finally decided to do something about it, but rather than writing a phpBB MOD, I decided to write a generic DYNamic TextArea Resizer (DYNTAR), a standalone javascript snippet that's easily plugable to any website. It's pretty small, coded with a non-intrusive approach and it should work on any DOM capable browser.

This article explains how it works and how you can add this gadget to your own website.