User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.4 Migration/Standardisation Strategy

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OOo Community Forums Migration Strategy

The current OOo Forums started with the creation of the English forum in Nov 2007 running on phpBB 3.0.0 over a Sun Coolstack platform and PostgreSQL 8.2 running on Solaris x86 infrastructure in the Sun Munich Facility. We subsequently upgraded to phpBB 3.0.1 and added the Hungarian, French, Spanish and Japanese forums. We are now in the process of adding the Vietnamese and Chinese forums. Given the proliferation of forums, the general growth in transactional volumes and the fact that phpBB is now at version 3.0.4, we have decided to upgrade the H/W infrastructure and install a clean rebaseline for all forums, This page describes the process and approach for migration the OOo forums from their current platform to the new installation.

Assumptions and Constraints

  • The current forum is running on a number of separate phpBB instances all at version 3.0.1 (but with disjoint code hierachies) over a common PostgreSQL 8.2 on a Solaris/Coolstack platform.
  • The content of the forums is largely maintained in the central database, though attachment and image data are maintained in the file separate file hierarchies. All such content will be preserved on migration.
  • A new H/W platform will be running Solaris 10, plus Coolstack 1.3.1 including the optional CSKPython package. All instances will use the 32bit CSK packaged MySQL 5.0.
  • The target forum configuration will be a largely “out of the box” configuration of phpBB version 3.0.4. We will retain a small number of changes as detailed in section Forum Customisation below.
  • The forum will have the phpBB Prosilver template, plus supported languages. All languages will be made avaialble to all instances. The Subsilver will not be supported.
  • Supported Languages will be English (UK and US), French, Spanish (Spain, Argentia, Catalan, Valencian), Hungarian, Mandarin (Traditional and Simplified Scripts), Japanese.
  • A common code base will be shared by all instances by symlinking the individual instance hierarchies to a common directory set.

Overview of Migration Strategy

Migration Process

Forum Customisation

The delivered customised instance contains the following changes:

  • Reorder window title to make multi-tab title more usable. All browser tabs are labelled with their title. The phpBB3 default is to begin the title with the forum name then page type, hence if you have a lot of tabs open they are called openOffi... By putting the specific title first, it makes it a lot easier to pick the correct tab.
  • Add Expand option to Code Block. phpBB3 now puts each code block in a scrollable window. This makes it a pain if you want to see all of the code in the browser. This mod adds an Expand option to the code block to allow you to blow it up to full size.
  • Tweak Access key codes to remove conflicts. For those that use keyboard accelerators within the broswer, the lack of a shortcut for Preview Post is a pain. This makes <Accel>+P a shortcut for Preview and <Accel>+G a shortcut for graphics.
  • Add Active Post count to View Active Topics. This just adds a count of new posts in the Active topics heading.
  • Add truncated title of last topic to Forum View. Lots of OOo volunteers asked for this one. It enables you to recognise at a glance if a forum has any new posts in it.
  • Customise Headers and Footers to OpenOffice.org branding. Add OOo Community logo and adjust framing colours to match. Add OOo favicon.
  • Rebasline to phpBB 3.0.4. The install is a patch file which updates the standard 3.0.4 unpacked tarball.
  • Add OpenOffice.org Qs to BB FAQ. The FAQ button goes to a phpBB3 standard FAQ which is all about using phpBB3. I've added a Q0 which points the user to the wiki and forum FAQs for OpenOffice info.
  • Add “Request to read Survival Guide before posting” to post form. The posting form now includes an instruction to read the FPG before you post. (This is only shown if you have less than 15 posts).
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