It's time for an overdue update on what's going on in the world of PunBB.
A long time ago, I proclaimed that I would eat my hat if PunBB 1.3 wasn't done by the end of the year. That was last year. I, together with the other guys on the development team, underestimated the amount of work involved in making 1.3 a reality as well as overestimated the amount of time and effort we would be able to put into the project. We all have other things that we need to prioritise sometimes (work, college, family etc). As a result of this, we're now in October and PunBB 1.3 isn't quite done yet. I'm sorry for this.
But fear not, we have absolutely not abandoned the project. The work on 1.3 is progressing at a higher rate than it has in a long time. The extension system is coming along nicely, Paul is in the midst of committing major markup and CSS updates and we are picking off items on our todo list more or less every day now. I'm confident we will be able to get PunBB 1.3 into your hands soon and it will be the best release of PunBB to date.
Now, as some of you might have heard, the rights to PunBB are no longer owned by myself and/or the other developers. Early this summer, we were approached by a company that wanted to support the project financially. Apart from sponsoring the project, they wanted to later down the line offer paid-for web services in relation to PunBB (for example commercial grade PunBB hosting). We decided we liked the idea and sold the rights to the project. Now, it's important to understand that with an application released under the GNU General Public License, the ownership of the copyright is pretty irrelevant. The fact that we don't own the copyright anymore doesn't really change anything. It should also be clear that once code is released under the GPL, it remains that way forever i.e. it cannot be made closed source retrospectively. PunBB stays open source and the core development team is the same. There's no evil conspiracy. Think of it as a way for us developers to make a buck while continuing to work on PunBB in the exact same way we did before. We haven't made a big song and dance about this because we know it doesn't affect the project in any noticeable way. We haven't even bothered to change the copyright notices yet. The only thing that has changed from before is that we, for obvious reasons, no longer accept donations.
Now, back to more important things. PunBB 1.3 is closing in. Soon we will release a beta and when the time comes, it would be really cool if those of you aspiring to be extension developers could sink your teeth into the extension system. As you know, the extension system relies on hooks that are placed throughout the code and it's sometimes difficult for us to predict where some of these hooks need to be placed. Together with the beta, we'll have a few extensions we've written ourselves up for grabs that you can use as a base (or just for inspiration) for your own creations.
As usual, you can follow the development of PunBB in the timeline. If you want to grab the very latest source, aim your Subversion client at svn.punbb.org/svn/punbb/branches/punbb-1.3-dev/.
Ta ta for now!
