PunBB

PunBB

PunBB 1.4.2 using the standard Oxygen style
Developer(s)	PunBB Team
Initial release	2003 (2003)
Stable release	1.4.2 / February 10, 2012 (2012-02-10)
Development status	Active
Written in	PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Internet forum
License	GNU General Public License
Website	punbb.informer.com

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. Many open-source and commercial projects' discussion boards use PunBB. Until September 2011, Facebook's Developers were using Facebook Developer's Forum for discussions and bug reports, which was powered by PunBB.

PunBB was originally designed to output standard XHTML, and with speed and simplicity in mind. Features such as private messaging, polls and file attachments were not originally implemented, however they have since been released as third-party modifications. PunBB supports extensions since version 1.3.

History

PunBB was founded by Rickard Andersson as a personal project to create an alernative to either over-featured or too graphic discussion boards. In August 2003, version 1.0 was released under the GNU General Public License. The developer released version 1.2 in January 2005 and immediately began work on version 1.3.

PunBB was originally known simply as Pun because "a pun is a play on words and that's basically what happens on a bulletin board". The BB addition stands for bulletin board.

In 2007 the project's code and rights were sold to Informer Technologies, Inc. The company did not institute any major changes at first other than removing the ability to donate money to the project. The work on version 1.3 continued and in the beginning of 2008 the beta version was released. In April 2008, Rickard Andersson decided to leave the project due to personal reasons. As a result, some developers followed suit, and initiated the development of their own fork, known as FluxBB. A few days later the company moved the project from punbb.org domain to its projects' umbrella domain at punbb.informer.com.

The work on version 1.3 was resumed and minor changes, as well as, some bug fixes were introduced in updates. In March 2011 the company released version 1.3.5 and in September 2011 version 1.3.6 became available to public. The third quarter of 2011 gave birth to a significantly revised version of the engine, 1.4.0, which is the latest one.

Requirements

PunBB is written in PHP and thus requires a PHP processor. PunBB also requires a database in which all forum data is stored. It supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Release history

Pre-release beta versions

Supported stable branch

Future versions

Version	Release Date	Notes
1.0	August 7, 2003	The project's first stable release.
1.1	January 03, 2004	Enabled sending e-mails to other users via the forum, RSS feeds for recent discussions, SHA-1 algorithm for password hashes; disabled HTML posting; implemented FAQ; turned on move/delete/open/close multiple topics at once.
1.2	January 08, 2005	Featured improved speed, security measures, as well as, the new markup.
1.3 Beta	January 30, 2008	Extensions development.
1.3 RC	June 17, 2008	1.3 Release Candidate
1.3.1	November 26, 2008	Minor bugs fixed; fixed an XSS vulnerability in moderate.php; Markup issues are fixed, language files are reviewed; Both outdated and obscure notifications are modified.
1.3.2	December 08, 2008	Minor bugs fixed; fixed an XSS vulnerability in login.php; fixed a possible SQL-injection in the the admin settings page with permission config values; addressed a possible SQL-injection in the the admin users page.
1.3.3	April 17, 2009	A number of bugs has been fixed (CSS & markup, defects in language files, correct response header placement upon errors, hook rearrangements, parsing posts in feeds, correct language pack detection during the final stage of the install process); security flaws addressed; it is now possible to limit searches to topic subjects or message bodies; users are not allowed to change their e-mails without entering their passwords first.
1.3.4	May 20, 2009	A fix for the the possible XSS vulnerability in profile.php during the password and e-mail change.
1.2.22	September 1, 2009	A possible XSS exploit in admin_prune.php was fixed.
1.2.23	August 11, 2010	A vulnerability in cookie authorization via "unserialize" function was fixed.
1.3.5	March 21, 2011	Addressed bugs in CSS; added missing lang entries in language files; corrected the path and alerts on install; corrected deprecated function calls; hidden guest email; increased visit timeout; implemented deleting of non-activated users during the registration process; fixed typos; added paginal navigation on admin users and bans pages; added validation timezone and report length, added hooks.
1.4 Beta 1	June 22, 2011	PunBB 1.4 First beta release.
1.4 Beta 2	June 30, 2011	PunBB 1.4 Second beta release.
1.4 Beta 3	July 10, 2011	PunBB 1.4 Third beta release.
1.4 RC 1	July 23, 2011	PunBB 1.4 First release candidate.
1.4 RC 2	August 14, 2011	PunBB 1.4 Second release candidate.
1.3.6	September 22, 2011	Introduced a fix for XSS vulnerabilities; fixed error in bans on admin/bans.php and profile.php; fixed invalid closing tag on profile.php.
1.4	November 7, 2011	Introduced support for international domain names, MySQL InnoDB and SQLite3; fixed censoring for Cyrillic and Unicode; implemented faster sampling of messages in large topics; simplified Login, Registration, and Search forms; asynchrous javascript loading, based on LABjs; dropped PHP 4 support (minimum required PHP version is 5.0); additional features for extension developers; added subscription to topics and message sending on CTRL+Enter.
1.4.1	December 1, 2011	Introduced a fix for XSS vulnerabilities and fixed javascript errors.
1.4.2	February 10, 2011	Introduced many bugfixes and Oxygen style updates.
Next	May 2012

See also

Computing portal

External links

• PunBB official website
• Official Twitter feed
• PunBB at GitHub
• PunBB Russian Community