Topic: PunBB 1.3 Beta
I just exported, zipped and uploaded revision 1400 of the 1.3 tree to the download folder. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for bug crunching! Download PunBB 1.3 Beta.
Here are a few notes of interest to all potential beta testers:
1. This is a beta (and not in the Google sense of the word), so don't expect everything to work perfectly. There are bugs. Don't replace your production server install with this just yet.
2. The documentation is a bit lacking at the moment (which in turn is a bit of an understatement :D). An overhauled version of the 1.2 documentation is in the pipeline. Included in this, among other things, is a short manual aimed at extension developers.
3. Speaking of extensions, please dig into and tinker with the extension system. We appreciate any comments, thoughts or ideas you have on the subject. In particular, we are interested in requests for new hooks. We are aware that, even though the code currently contains a great number of hooks, there is need for more.
4. Another area of interest is the greatly improved update script. In PunBB 1.3, we are aiming for full UTF-8 compatibility. In order to accommodate this, the update script now does character set conversion to make sure as much as possible of existing content can be transferred over into valid UTF-8. This process is quite complex and the number of variations of characters sets out there is more or less infinite. Please put the update script through its paces. In order to realize proper UTF-8 support, we had to bump the MySQL requirement to 4.1.2. Hopefully, this shouldn't affect too many of you.
5. As you might have realized, virtually every line of code and markup has been affected by the move to 1.3. What this means is that existing language packs are useless in 1.3. When the time comes for 1.3 final, it would be great to have a few additional languages available for download on the website. We would however appreciate if you could give us a few more days to tidy up some of the language files before you start. The new admin language file in particular, is a mess at the moment.
I think that about covers it for now. Please try to keep all discussions relating to the beta in the new 1.3 Beta talk.
Enjoy!
Edit: I've uploaded a zip file containing some simple example extensions for you to play with. Nothing fancy, but at least, you'll have something to base your own extensions on.