PunBB
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| PunBB | |
|---|---|
 PunBB 1.3 |
|
| Developed by | Rickard Andersson |
| Latest release | 1.2.17 / 2008-02-20 |
| Preview release | 1.3 Beta / 2008-01-29 |
| OS | PHP / MySQL |
| Genre | Internet forum |
| License | GPL |
| Website | punbb.informer.com |
PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than similar software, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML and CSS compliant pages.
Currently, PunBB runs on a number of operating systems that are able to support the PHP scripting language. To store its data, PunBB relies on either MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.
Contents |
[edit] History
PunBB's creator, Rickard Andersson, wrote the software for a personal project after he found there was no open source forum software at the time that output valid XHTML pages. Speed and simplicity are the main goals of PunBB, so Rickard chose not to implement features such as private-messaging, polls and file attachments. These features have since been released as third-party modifications.
PunBB was originally known simply as 'Pun' because "pun is a play on words and that's basically what happens on a bulletin board." [1] This was later changed to ensure the name didn't stand out compared to similar software such as phpBB. The 'BB' addition stands for Bulletin Board.
Version 1.0 of PunBB was released in August of 2003.
The domain of PunBB was moved to punbb.informer.com from punbb.org in late April of 2008. Rickard Andersson said "Moving the PunBB website under the informer.com domain is a way for our benefactors to promote their other services to the PunBB community and to promote PunBB to users of their other services. The move does not affect the project in any other way, including GPL terms.".[2]. Lots of community members disagreed this change.
In May 2008, several developers created a software fork called FluxBB.
[edit] Version 1.3
The next major release of PunBB, version 1.3, is currently under development. This version will feature many tweaks and improvements of the 1.2.x codebase, along with some new features. These include:
- New markup and CSS.
- Search engine optimized "Fancy URLs" via mod_rewrite.
- Proper extension support - Extend the functionality without touching a line of PHP code.
- New topic read marking system.
- Improved syndication - Feeds extended to include individual topics. Also feeds in the form of Atom and XML format.
- Multiple moderator groups.
- Per-style templates - It will be possible to have one set of templates per style.
- Unicode (UTF-8) support.
PunBB is also open to feature requests.
[edit] Release history
| Key: | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Old Version | Current Version | Pre-release Version | Future Version |
| Name | Version | Release date | Significant changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| PunBB 1.0 | 1.0 | 2003-08-07 | Official Version 1.0 release. [3] |
| 1.0.1 | 2003-08-19 | Fixed moderator username not being updated in the forum moderator list when he/she changes his/hers username. Replaced all calls to htmlspecialchars() with pun_htmlspecialchars(). The function is identical to the PHP version but doesn't translate &#xxxx style entities. This way a lot of non ISO-8859-1 charsets will still be viewable regardless of the Content-Type meta tag. Implemented workaround for searching in multibyte character text. Added operating system to the admin index page statistics. Added named anchors to the different help sections in help.php. Links to the help document from other scripts now point directly to the section of interest. Removed the language choice from the install script. Fixed typo in Swedish language file for delete.php. Fixed error on admin index page when using "exotic" characters in the database name. | |
| PunBB 1.1 | 1.1 | 2004-01-03 | Official Version 1.1 release. [4] |
| 1.1.1 | 2004-01-14 | Contained only bugfixes. | |
| 1.1.2 | 2004-02-15 | Contained only bugfixes. | |
| 1.1.3 | 2004-04-01 | Contained only bugfixes. | |
| 1.1.4 | 2004-04-25 | Minor bugfixes, but contained a fix for a potential security vulnerability. | |
| 1.1.5 | 2004-07-15 | Made to remedy two security issues and to fix two bugs. | |
| PunBB 1.2 | 1.2 | 2005-01-08 | Official Version 1.2 release. [5] |
| 1.2.1 | 2005-02-02 | Fixed a number of bugs (roughly 20 to 25 of them) that have surfaced since the release of 1.2. Additionally, one new feature and a bunch of markup and CSS related tweaks and fixes have made it into this release. | |
| 1.2.2 | 2005-02-04 | Made primarily to deal with a number of security vulnerabilities in PunBB 1.2/1.2.1. PunBB 1.2.2 fixes a number of SQL injection vulnerabilities in register.php, profile.php and moderate.php (posted to Bugtraq a few hours ago) as well as a file disclosure vulnerability in admin_loader.php. On top of this, a small number of non-security related bugs have been adressed. | |
| 1.2.3 | 2005-03-11 | Made primarily to address a number of security vulnerabilities. | |
| 1.2.4 | 2005-03-19 | Made to remedy a few security vulnerabilities (primarily an XSS bug in profile.php) as well as fix a few minor glitches and annoyances. | |
| 1.2.5 | 2005-04-07 | Incorporated a number of security upgrades, a few bug fixed and a rather large performance tweak (primarily affecting very busy forums). | |
| 1.2.6 | 2005-07-07 | One or two rather serious vulnerabilities and a number of not-so-serious security concerns have been dealt with. | |
| 1.2.7 | 2005-09-02 | A minor bug and vulnerability fix. | |
| 1.2.8 | 2005-09-21 | A small bug and vulnerability fix. | |
| 1.2.9 | 2005-10-16 | Fixed an SQL injection vulnerability in search.php that is exploitable in PHP environments with register_globals enabled. | |
| 1.2.10 | 2005-11-01 | Made to fix a couple of semi-serious security issues as well as a few minor bugs and annoyances. | |
| 1.2.11 | 2006-02-28 | Made primarily to address an issue with the registration script that allowed a malicious user to perform a denial-of-service attack. Added code to the registration script that prevents these flood registrations. On top of this, an XSS vulnerability has been addressed. | |
| 1.2.12 | 2006-05-20 | Fixed two XSS vulnerabilities and one minor bug. | |
| 1.2.13 | 2006-09-27 | Dealt with the NULL byte injection vulnerability and added support for HttpOnly cookies. | |
| 1.2.14 | 2006-10-15 | Addressed a few security problems, fixed a bug or two, added a search performance tweak and added stylesheet fixes to fully support the Internet Explorer 7 release. | |
| 1.2.15 | 2007-04-11 | Dealt with quite a few bugs, annoyances and security issues. The template files have been updated to include the xmlns attribute for the html tag. | |
| 1.2.16 | 2007-11-19 | Fixed two security vulnerabilities and corrected topic/post counts for forums to include redirected topics. | |
| 1.2.17 | 2008-02-20 | Two rather serious security vulnerabilities as well as a couple of other minor fixes and annoyances. | |
| PunBB 1.3 | 1.3 Beta | 2008-01-29 | See PunBB#Version 1.3 |
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
Official
Unofficial
