phpBB Launches Next Wave of Social Networking and Forum Features

December 13, 2007; 09:54 AM

London, UK – December 13, 2007 – phpBB™, the leading open source forum and online collaboration system announced today the availability of phpBB Version 3.0. This release includes enhanced collaboration features, better security and delegated administration features, extended support for open source and commercial database management systems, and optimisation for mobile devices and search engines. phpBB is available at no cost, released under the GNU General Public License.

Online discussion forums and user-generated content represent the largest source of new information on the Internet. phpBB is used throughout the world by commercial and non-commercial companies to share documents, collaborate and encourage peer-to-peer resolution of issues to reduce the cost of product and/or technical support.

“phpBB is a highly scalable, feature rich environment that can be easily deployed and integrated into any Web site or online application,” says Bob Norton of HREnhancement. “phpBB version 3 represents a huge milestone and we continue to be amazed by this project and its community.”

phpBB is easy-to-use with an intuitive administration system and extensive customisation capabilities. It is capable of supporting hundreds of millions of discussions in any language and boasts some of the largest forum communities on the Internet. phpBB is developed by six core developers, more than forty team members and is supported by a community of almost 300,000 users and developers. Among the new features announced today, phpBB has been specifically optimised for the mobile market.

“With the enhanced search engine optimisation of phpBB, we see a huge opportunity for companies to deploy more customer self-service and collaboration features for their customers,” says William Leake, Chief Executive Officer of Apogee Search. “The mobile Web is a key component for every 2008 Web strategy and phpBB is a perfect fit for the growing mobile collaboration market.”

The phpBB community is comprised of users, Web developers and designers have produced more than 5,000 add-ons and 400 styles for phpBB2 making it easy for Website owners to customise the system to their needs. The phpBB community has already made nearly 500 enhancements, modifications and extensions for phpBB version 3.0, even before final release.

Organisations can quickly build advanced social networking communities using phpBB and it can be deployed with “one-click” through cPanel, Plesk, Ensim, DirectAdmin and Fantastico. Hosting providers such as GoDaddy, The Planet, and 1and1 provide phpBB with many standard hosting packages.

“phpBB version 3 represents over five years of development from some of the most talented developers in the world. As the project continues to grow, we hope to serve our community better and deliver innovative software that is released under the GPL. Our sincere thanks go to our users, developers, team members and partners.” Says Meik Sievertsen, Lead Developer of the phpBB project. With phpBB version 3, detailed source code analysis and penetration testing has also been performed to proactively make steps toward improved enterprise security.

For developers who want to quickly and inexpensively integrate collaboration and forum capabilities into their own Web applications, phpBB provides a flexible framework, documented Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), customisable themes, and extensions. phpBB can quickly integrate into almost any content management system (CMS) or static Website.