User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.5 Migration/Follow-up Issues and Actions

Follow-up Issues and Actions

I have included the list of open issues in alphabetic order below. For closed issues see Closed Issues and Actions. My current intent is now to defer any further work to the phpBB3.0.5 Migration

Automated Unactivated Users Prune

This is another batch script that I have still in development. It automates a tedious twice weekly task. Low priority until the issues which are impacting the NL Administrators are sorted.

Forum Permissions and Access

I am an admin on all forums and should therefore have edit access to all forums. If I go into the ACP->Manage Groups->Group Forum Permissions and check, the Admin group has full permission on all forums. However in some forums, e.g. es and fr, I don't have edit edit access to topics but I do on some such as en. I haven't bottomed out what the difference is yet. The relevant code fragment from viewtopic.php (prettied for readability) is:

  'U_EDIT'       => (!$user->data['is_registered']) ?  : 
                       ( ( ( $user->data['user_id'] == $poster_id && 
                             $auth->acl_get('f_edit', $forum_id) && 
                             ( $row['post_time'] > time() - ( $config['edit_time'] * 60 ) || 
                               !$config['edit_time']
                             )
                           ) || $auth->acl_get('m_edit', $forum_id)
                         ) ? append_sid("{$phpbb_root_path}posting.$phpEx", 
                                        "mode=edit&f=$forum_id&p={$row['post_id']}") :
                             ),

that is for other than the O/P, acl_get must return the m_edit privilege for that forum.

Until I can work this one out the work around is to pick a moderator and test his permissions. Alternatively you need to be explicitly placed in a Moderator Group. Admins by default don't seem to inherit all moderator rights.

Language Localisation

The out-of-the-box language packs contain some mistranslations, A number of the NL Administrators have posted changes asking me to correct various miswordings in their translations. Also we've had various customisations of the GUI which requires extra localisations.

I did develop a process where the NL administrators could make changes using a test database but this wasn't a success, and proved introduce more problems that it solved. I've gone back to sending out a Calc spreadsheet of the phrases to be translated and asked the NL admins to fill it in. They can also add any from and to pairs that they want to change themselves. Whilst they all seem to struggle with the phpBB Administrator interface, they were all comfortable with calc (remember that is an OOo forum after all).

Language Pack Inconsistencies

Even though the Langauge packs are shared, the corresponding language tables in the forums were brought across from the old databases and are therefore inconsistent. This doesn't impact phpBB at an applications level, but it would make sense to standardise these as a one off. (The only difference should be whether the individual packs are enabled for a given forum.)

After some debate with the NL administrators, I've downloaded and rebaselined to the latest 3.0.5 NL packs for all supported languages.

RSS Feed

A number of the power users on the fr forum used the previous RSS feed. This functionality has been temporarily dropped and needs reinstituted. The current implementation adopts the Simple RSS mod for phpBB3. However, this mod has significant limitations that I can't ignore. Most importantly it bypasses the phpBB access control system, allowing unregistered users to browse closed forums.

I need to discuss this further with the fr proponents of this mod.