Finally, the most anticipated Phorum release ever. It has been almost a year since the last release. We took our time and made sure we did a good job this time around. You can see the large changelog here.

I want to thank Vulpes, Thomas, and Malcolm for all their contibutions. I also want to thank all those who submitted bugs and sent patches and fixes. Without you this would not have happened.

For those who haven't seen what all the fuss is about, Phorum 3.3 offers many new features. The most obvious is user login and user based moderation. The admin has also been re-arranged to be better suited for everyday users.

Please enjoy our latest release and report back with any bugs.

As you may notice the site is being transitioned to a new look. Hopefully I will find all the pages. This new look moves Phorum.org to being more (hehe) XHTML proper and uses style sheets much more. It also allows us to keep the sidebar up at all times, even in the forums.

Also, please notice the Donate button on the left. I have received emails from people asking how they can give back. So, I set up a special donation account with PayPal.

Work on Phorum 4 has been halted. I think we found ourselves coding something that was incredibly cool, but the majority of people did not need or want. It was not a complete waste of time. We learned some things from it.

So, we will be continuing work on Phorum 3 and perhaps do a big rewrite later on that will be Phorum 5.

I have been coding on a new bug system. It is now live here on the site. SF was not doing it for us because we could not do follow up easily.

The code is covered under the Phorum License and available to those who want it. See the BUGS page for the link.

Raman Sinha got Phorum running on his Powerbook. Wow, if you are like me you are excited about the idea of Mac OSX. Just thinking of a stable GUI on top of a *nix kernel makes me glow. The beta has been out a while and version 1.0 is due out soon. And actually according to this post at dealmac you can buy it at Staples now.

The Phorum team is happy to welcome Stepan 'Vulpes' Mazurov to the team. Some you may know him from the site he has run about Phorum hacks.

Look for him in the support forums.

Update: The paper that was used in the presentation is available at dealnews.com.

Brian Moon, lead developer of Phorum, will be giving a session along with Daniel Beckham at this years Apachecon in San Jose, CA. The session is titled "Caching Dynamic Web Content to Increase Dependability and Performance".

The conference is April 4,5,6.

Hope to see you there.

Well, Phorum has a new host, Rackspace. The old host (you know who you are) will not answer my email. They just suddenly shut us off without warning or reason. So the bad news is that we lost all of the old forums and the mailing list subscriptions. The mailing list and forums are still archived at MARC.

The mailing lists themselves will be back in a day or so.

Thanks,

Phorum Dev Team.