Difference between revisions of "User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7 Upgrade/Issues and Actions"

Revision as of 00:09, 18 March 2010

I have included the list of open issues and activities that I intend to carried out as part of the phpBB V3.0.7 upgrade below.

The Core Build

This work is now complete and all ten live NL databases migrated to 3.0.7. See Closed Issues and Actions for details on the process.

Automated Backup

I had a set of scripts that ran as a cron job for the old server with the PostgresSQL D/B, but I turned these off when I moved to MySQL and we decommissioned using the OUCV server as a second site. I have a script which I use manually about once per week (on top of standard Solaris backups), but I would prefer to have a nightly incremental dump.

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.

Automated Administrator Email Responder

V1 of this was developed about a year ago. I upgraded V2 to Python for deployment with phpBB V305. This fails to part about 5% of valid email queries and rejects these as errors. I need to fix this as part of the upgrade to V307.

Enabling Atom Feeds

A number of the power users on the FR forum used the previous RSS feed. This functionality has been dropped and an equivalent needs reinstituted. The previous mod implementation adopted 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 I didn't get this working properly but this functionality is now superseded by a standard php V306 feature to provide ATOM feeds.

• We need to investigate its implementation for those forums that want it, as it requires enabling / configuring through ACP.
• I need to discuss this further with the FR proponents of this mod.
• Note that for some reason, the ATOM feed link isn't being displayed if the Feed is enable. I need to investigate this.

Logfile Retention Policy

At the moment I've configured Logfile rotation on the Apache access and error logs on a weekly basis. At the moment I periodically compress old logs and delete access logs older the 3 months. Rotation on the MySQL logs is also done on an adhoc basis. I need to implement a simple weekly cron task which:

• Rotates the Mysql log
• Compresses logs older than one week
• Deletes the compress access and mysql error logs files older than 3 months.

Basic Management Reporting

Some of the NL forums are clearly active and healthy. Some clearly less so. However, we have no objective measures in place to identify any issues that are arising and any trends that need to trigger additional support for any individual forum that might be having problems. One option here might be to introduce some basic health measures so that we can maintain a simple forum dashboard.

Retiring Custom Fields

This functionality has been moved into the standard signature format. I have already done this for the EN forums and swithed off the use of custom fields in the creation of new accounts on all forums, but I've got about existing 800 accounts across three NL forums where I need to move this data into the signatures.

Standardising Forum Configurations

With 10 forums any degree of divergence can cause problems on upgrade and through-life maintenance, so we need to standardise where possible. I am not talking about language packs or basic forum structure but things like the extra BBcodes, permissible file extensions for upload, etc.. If they make sense in one OOo forum then they should be in all.

Write up phpBB 3.0.7 configuration

I have decided to do this in the phpBB wiki because this will be of more interest to phpBB admins rather than OOo Volunteers and NL Admins. I will post the link here when I've done it.