This script actually looks pretty solid, I think me and a friend may try to expand upon and improve this.

Only problem is that he claims that Perl is hard to mess around with, but I think a fork could be a good idea.

"he claims that Perl is hard to mess around with"

Then I'm guessing neither of you are experienced enough with Perl to take on a worthwhile expansion or improvement of E-Blah.

Quoted from iCONICA

"he claims that Perl is hard to mess around with"

Then I'm guessing neither of you are experienced enough with Perl to take on a worthwhile expansion or improvement of E-Blah.

However, I can do CSS/HTML/Graphics, and I think I could figure out the markup in order to make it look better.

Although, my friend didn't specifically say he didn't know perl, he's very good with other forms of programming languages it seems, heck he's even working on a rather major new art site, and here are his credentials

He also hinted that if we end up having to port this to PHP instead, we could use parts of the engines he designed for TASP.

Also, I forgot to mention, forking E-Blah is allowed. He chose to license it under the GPL. He can't take that back easily. The license encourages making our own improvements to it, a "fork" as it were.

We could easily establish a fork of the project under our own control, set up a version control system (which would replace the "nightly" system, it'd just be a server containing a constantly updating "trunk" version of the software that can be downloaded or "committed" to at any time with special software), and make a working "image" of the last released version combined with the last nightly build be the initial import. This would make the development process alot more community oriented.

As stated in this thread:

http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1266087427.32879/

I'm all for people improving the script and wouldn't mind giving some of the trusted people in the community (such as Martin and Cameron/pcmantinker) access to the server and script for pushing new changes live, though I'd rather have them submitted to myself for review before that happens because it helps create a better script (code review).  I do believe that a fork of E-Blah is not in the best interest of the script; however, I don't have a problem with that happening.  Generally, forks with different developers aren't the greatest idea (though it does work out at times) but there's nothing keeping me or anyone else from making that happen.

All that said, any fork must keep the E-Blah copyright (at bare minimum inside the headers over every piece of the script)... but it cannot be released under the E-Blah name.  Essentially, any forked release would be a "patch" to E-Blah (unless most of the script that was E-Blah were to be completely rewritten).

Quoted from Justin

As stated in this thread:

http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1266087427.32879/

I'm all for people improving the script and wouldn't mind giving some of the trusted people in the community (such as Martin and Cameron/pcmantinker) access to the server and script for pushing new changes live, though I'd rather have them submitted to myself for review before that happens because it helps create a better script (code review).  I do believe that a fork of E-Blah is not in the best interest of the script; however, I don't have a problem with that happening.  Generally, forks with different developers aren't the greatest idea (though it does work out at times) but there's nothing keeping me or anyone else from making that happen.

All that said, any fork must keep the E-Blah copyright (at bare minimum inside the headers over every piece of the script)... but it cannot be released under the E-Blah name.  Essentially, any forked release would be a "patch" to E-Blah (unless most of the script that was E-Blah were to be completely rewritten).

We were gonna call it blahblahblah.

And yeah, forks with different devs have happened before, I remember when the lead developer of PunBB sold the rights to it to a commercial company and everyone went ballistic. So they established FluxBB, which has made improvements to the PunBB 1.2 platform under the guise of FluxBB 1.4, although I hear 2.0 will diverge even more from the 1.2 codebase.

As Justin said, it is probably not in E-Blah's best interest to make a fork. It might cause confusion with support for the two projects. I know the supporters of E-Blah don't want to be bothered with support questions from another forum software that has significant difference from E-Blah. I would like to keep E-Blah going with its current name and not create a new project based on E-Blah.

Depending on how long it takes you to learn the database, it may be a while before you can develop a good fork. It took me about a year to figure out how the database was structured. I first started with theme design for E-Blah and later moved onto mods to learn about the database structure. I've also been working on the SQL version of the software and learning more about the database from there.

Also about your comment on "porting" to PHP, it's not really that simple. You wouldn't be able to really call it a fork from E-Blah if you were to write it in PHP. The system would be completely different if it were written in PHP and you might as well make your own forum if you were to try and rewrite E-Blah in PHP. It would be quite an extensive project but could be done with dedicated developers.

I'm not trying to discourage you from making a fork, but do realize that it will be a lot of work to maintain and you will need a good team behind you. It takes time for software to become something good. The first few versions of major software titles such as Microsoft Word and Excel seemed to be very basic, but as time passed, more features were incorporated to make them better. I do realize however that the fork would be based on the current version of E-Blah and wouldn't require reinventing the wheel entirely.

Yeah, I understand, but thenagain, FluxBB 1.4 doesn't make "that" many changes over PunBB 1.2 either, besides a different name, no control by a commercial entity, a new default theme, unicode support, and the ability to "downgrade" from PunBB/FluxBB 1.3. Heck their first "release" was just a re-branding of 1.2 and 1.3...

I think the first change we will be making too will be a interface facelift too. Oh yeah, the repository is set up now. We tried to set it up on our own server, but we had issues getting the Mercurial CGI component to work. Currently its just a direct import of the current stable, we may try and import the changes from the last nightly to it later since this is the trunk version..

To follow on from what I have said at --> http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1279669622.16261/

As for other forum converters, looks like I am now going to have to explore all of this, and see where I end up.

I may end up where this all started at YABB and take it from there