FluxBB
Encyclopedia
FluxBB is a lightweight free software
PHP
-based internet discussion board system. FluxBB is a fork of the PunBB
project, created in response to developers protesting the increasing emphasis of a partnership with a corporate organization on the PunBB project. As with PunBB, it is released under the GNU General Public License
.
In light of the changed circumstances the remaining members of the development team decided to fork the project in order to regain control over future project direction. FluxBB was the result of this decision.
FluxBB was announced as a finalist in SourceForge.net
's 2008 Community Choice Awards in the "Best New Project" category.
Although it was developed under a version 1.3 branch under both PunBB and FluxBB, it was announced in January 2009 that the then-current 1.3 branch would be discontinued, and that the future FluxBB 1.4 would revert to being based on the 1.2 codebase. As a result, version of 1.3 with all known bugs fixed was released as the "1.3-legacy" in April 2009.
To maintain compatibility between the two forum systems, the PunBB developers have imported changes to the core made in FluxBB to the PunBB core, although it is foreseen that the two forums' feature sets will diverge in the future.
The current release FluxBB 1.4, which is a direct upgrade from 1.2 and 1.3, is based on the 1.2 release, adding several features backported from 1.3, including UTF-8
support, a new default theme, and the ability to split and merge posts. The extension system however, is not included.
and CSS
, add a templating system, and subforums/no categories mode.
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
-based internet discussion board system. FluxBB is a fork of the PunBB
PunBB
PunBB is a lightweight PHP-based internet discussion board system. It is released under the GNU General Public License. The project's primary goal is to be a faster, smaller and less graphic alternative to discussion boards such as phpBB, Invision Power Board or vBulletin.Currently many open-source...
project, created in response to developers protesting the increasing emphasis of a partnership with a corporate organization on the PunBB project. As with PunBB, it is released under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
.
History
FluxBB is a fork of PunBB which was created by Rickard Andersson. In 2007, PunBB was sold to a commercial company. Development continued under the direction of Rickard Andersson until April 2008. At that time Rickard Andersson announced he would be ceasing his active involvement with the project, at least temporarily.In light of the changed circumstances the remaining members of the development team decided to fork the project in order to regain control over future project direction. FluxBB was the result of this decision.
FluxBB was announced as a finalist in SourceForge.net
SourceForge.net
SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. The website runs a version of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, forked from the last open-source version available...
's 2008 Community Choice Awards in the "Best New Project" category.
Although it was developed under a version 1.3 branch under both PunBB and FluxBB, it was announced in January 2009 that the then-current 1.3 branch would be discontinued, and that the future FluxBB 1.4 would revert to being based on the 1.2 codebase. As a result, version of 1.3 with all known bugs fixed was released as the "1.3-legacy" in April 2009.
To maintain compatibility between the two forum systems, the PunBB developers have imported changes to the core made in FluxBB to the PunBB core, although it is foreseen that the two forums' feature sets will diverge in the future.
The current release FluxBB 1.4, which is a direct upgrade from 1.2 and 1.3, is based on the 1.2 release, adding several features backported from 1.3, including UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
support, a new default theme, and the ability to split and merge posts. The extension system however, is not included.
Future development
FluxBB 2.0 will be a totally new branch from scratch, and it is a successor to 1.3. It will add a new one-click extension system which allows users to easily extend features and functionality, although the feature was originally included in FluxBB 1.3. FluxBB 2.0 will also improve markupMarkup language
A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...
and CSS
CSS
-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
, add a templating system, and subforums/no categories mode.
Release history
| Key: | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release no longer supported | Release still supported | Test release | Future release |
| Name | Version | Release date | Significant changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| FluxBB 1 | 1.2.18 | 2008-05-09 | A stability update for 1.2 which fixes several known issues with PunBB 1.2.17. |
| 1.2.19 | 2008-07-10 | Addresses three fairly serious security vulnerabilities and provides a fix for an issue with userlist.php. | |
| 1.2.20 | 2008-07-13 | Removes the code added in include/parser.php which was causing the BBCode issue and replaces it with new code which handles the underlying issue in a different way. | |
| 1.2.21 | 2008-12-04 | Fixed a subtle permissions bug. | |
| 1.2.22 | 2009-08-31 | Fixes an XSS vulnerability and minor internal changes | |
| 1.2.23 | 2010-08-12 | Fixes PHP unserialize security vulnerability and other small bugs. | |
| 1.2.24 | 2011-08-12 | Minor bugfixes. | |
| 1.3 Beta 2 | 2008-05-09 | First FluxBB 1.3 beta release. | |
| 1.3-r718 | 2009-01-11 | 1.3 version with obvious issues fixed. | |
| 1.3-legacy | 2009-04-23 | 1.3-r718 with minor issues fixed. | |
| 1.4 Beta 1 | 2009-05-26 | First FluxBB 1.4 beta release. | |
| 1.4 Beta 2 | 2009-08-09 | Second FluxBB 1.4 beta release. | |
| 1.4 RC1 | 2010-01-07 | First FluxBB 1.4 release candidate. | |
| 1.4 RC2 | 2010-04-19 | Second FluxBB 1.4 release candidate. | |
| 1.4 RC3 | 2010-04-22 | Third FluxBB 1.4 release candidate. | |
| 1.4.0 | 2010-06-19 | Based on 1.2, with UTF-8 support, MySQL/MySQLi dblayers that use InnoDB, split and merge posts, per-style templates, Atom and RSS feed support, new default style. | |
| 1.4.1 | 2010-07-22 | First maintenance release in 1.4 branch. Fixes XSS security vulnerability, multiple bugs including SQLite stability fixes and usability enhancements. | |
| 1.4.2 | 2010-08-09 | Second maintenance release in 1.4 branch. Fixes PHP unserialize security vulnerability and other small bugs including utf8 username issues. | |
| 1.4.3 | 2011-01-22 | Fixes 21 bugs and includes 25 enhancements. Now fully translatable (with install and update scripts). | |
| 1.4.4 | 2011-02-05 | Fixes 9 bugs and has 16 enhancements. | |
| 1.4.5 | 2011-04-05 | Fixes 21 bugs and has 13 enhancements, including batch editing functionality on the admin users page. | |
| 1.4.6 | 2011-08-12 | Last feature release of the 1.4 branch. With performance, parser, updating and translation improvements. | |
| FluxBB 2 | 2.0 | TBA | Including features from 1.3, with additional features such as per-style templates and other unannounced features. |