bbsengine.org was registered on 2008-10-11 with the goal of providing a simple yet elegant php-based web application library for developers using, at the time, php4. bbsengine1 had some security problems bbsengine1security) which were fixed in bbsengine2. bbsengine3 is written in php5.4 (requires 5.4.x or above) and uses PostgreSQL (9.2.x or above), the Smarty3 template engine (3.1.30+), and several modules from PEAR including pager, html_quickform2, html_quickform2_captcha and mdb2.

The first release of bbsengine has a datestamp of 20040118 16:47 EST

In June 2011 use of html_page2 (requires 0.6.5-beta or above) was added and an upgrade to Smarty3 from smarty2 was performed.

• switches PEAR::MDB2 with PDO
• uses php8.x
• namespaces
• groups database and session functions into their own namespace databaseconnect(SYSTEMDSN) to \bbsengine6\database\connect(SYSTEMDSN)
• named bound paramters instead of positional
• calls to utility functions like getcurrenturi() become \bbsengine6\gertcurrenturi()

• handbook (updated 5 months ago)
• API documentation (updated 55 years ago)
• changelog (updated 55 years ago)
• readme (updated 55 years ago)
• install (updated 55 years ago)
• releasenotes (updated 55 years ago)

• mostly enhancements to the python version
• use pgcrypto

• switched out PEAR::HTML_Page2 with use of "template inheritance" in smarty3,
• php 5.4.16 for new array syntax

based on suggestions from a user, I've merged the project 'bbsenginedotorg' (this website) with 'bbsengine3' to serve as a basic example of how to get a site working using this framework.

I've radically updated the INSTALL file so the version numbers of various packages are accurate, to make descriptions more concise, and to offer some useful hints as to how to configure things so they will work well.

form handling has been simplified down to three function calls which allows for very straight-forward use of enhanced forms:

• handleform() - accept an html_quickform2 instance and a standard callback parameter. returns True if all went well (form validates) or PEAR::Error if things went wrong.
• getquickform() - updated to add recursive rules which call trim() and striptags() instead of putting two function calls into every use of quickform.
• displayform - accepts an html_quickform2_renderer instance. this function is normally called if handleform() returns something other than True or PEAR::Error.

The bbsengine handbook now uses MarkDown for human-readable markup.

There is now a 'composer.json' file shipped with bbsengine3, but it has not been tested beyond a simple check to make sure it does not contain syntax errors (lint). I am interested in tools that will take a list of package names (f.e. the output of 'pear list') and set up the required records automagically including state ('beta', 'stable', etc).

before bbsengine.org existed, I maintained a freshmeat.net entry for 'bbsengine' and several applications.

• use of schemas. one database per domain. FKs maintained.
• python package
• html_quickform2
• python version

• rewrite to use PEAR::MDB2 instead of PEAR::DB
• rewrite database access to use bound parameters (closing one CVE)
• hack wpprop to circumvent 2 CVEs
• renamed a few of the core functions so it is clearer what they do (for example, "errormessage()" has been renamed to "displayerrorpage()", "displayheader()" renamed to "displaypageheader()")
• displayheader() and displayfooter() have now been replaced with use of HTML_Page2 and fetchpageheader() and fetchpagefooter()
• added some API functions that were not available in bbsengine1 (examples: getquickform(), getpage(), fetchpageheader() and fetchpagefooter())
• spun off applications (aolbonics, demeter, sophia, teos, vulcan) into separate projects
• changed to use the MDB2 database abstraction layer instead of DB
• used rules in html_quickform for cleaner handling of input validation
• database queries make use of "bound parameters" to prevent sql injection attacks
• added fetchpageheader() and fetchpagefooter() and modified displaypageheader() and displaypagefooter() to use them. This change is part of using HTML_Page2 for generating pages
• made heavy use of PEAR::raiseError() to improve error handling and to display an error message to the user which the developer can easily grep for and address. All library functions use raiseError and do not output any error messages to the user.
• made use of foreign key constraints in the postgresql database.

• Sophia is a threaded discussion system which could be configured as a "blog" (which means a select group of people can start new threads) or "forum" (which means anyone can start a new thread)
• Teos is a "catalog view" into the zoidtechnologies.com content, similar to dir.yahoo.com or dmoz.org.
• Vulcan is a view of only the "links" part of the content database
• Repo is a software repository where you can find various open source packages that Zoid Technologies maintains
• Projects is a list of released projects crosslinked into the repo site for file downloads