Next forum upgrade

In this forum you can write about anything that does not fit in other forums.
This includes generic Oric talkings and things that are totaly unrelated but want to share with people here :)
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Dbug
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Next forum upgrade

Post by Dbug »

I've been informed by my ISP that they would stop supporting PHP 7 and automatically switch to PHP 8.2 on January 17th.
The current version of PHPBB (3.3.8) may, or may not properly work with PHP 8, but the new one (3.3.9) seems to have fixes for that.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2631536

What that means, is that I will probably have to do a PHPBB update one of these days, then a PHP update of the server itself.

I've no idea if the rest of my PHP code is actually PHP 8 compatible, guess I'll have to find a way to validate that.
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Chema
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by Chema »

Oops... good luck! I just hope everything goes smoothly. We don't want any disruptions in our favourite forum :)

If I can do anything to help or test...
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Dbug
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by Dbug »

I'm going to update the server to php 8.1, apparently the current version of phpBB should work just fine on it.

Now the big question is the rest of Defence-Force.org:
- the wiki
- my own php code (osdk.org, blog, etc...)

So if things are broken, you will know why.
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Dbug
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by Dbug »

We are now using php 8.1, was pretty much painless, other than some warnings in the oric library I had to fix.

If you see anything that does not behave properly, please tell.
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xahmol
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by xahmol »

Might be time to ditch PHP altogether, but that of course is quite a project.
Myself quite pleased going from Wordpress to static HTML pages generated by a static page generator (Gatsby using React on node.js) from a headless CMS (Contentful), hosted on AWS S3 with Cloudfront, deployed via AWS Amplify. Site is way faster, way more secure and with much lower hosting cost.

Also for the forum there are solutions building on similar architecture, see https://github.com/tkang/amplify-forum

And probably many more modern options,
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Dbug
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by Dbug »

Not everything can be generated statically, like the Oric Library has a search engine which returns different sets of data depending of the parameters.
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xahmol
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by xahmol »

Dbug wrote: Sun Jan 08, 2023 9:39 pm Not everything can be generated statically, like the Oric Library has a search engine which returns different sets of data depending of the parameters.
That can all be done as well. See for example https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/how-to/ad ... ng-search/
Many solutions to do so. But did not try this myself yet. Reminds me I should put that on my to do list 😉
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Dbug
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by Dbug »

I'd like the site to still be usable with no-script enabled.

Personally I like PHP, I'm not trying to use the latest web tech, I don't find that interesting or pleasant, the website is a side hobby and PHP honestly has no more problems than any other web tech.

90% of the techs people were using when I started this site are now forgotten or just appeared as bleeps on the technological landscape.

Not relying on the cloud means that the system is more or less self-sufficient, easy to migrate to another server, there are no API keys, no dependencies on things that may be gone 5 years from now.

It's basically what I wrote at the end off this article
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xahmol
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by xahmol »

No problem, everybody their own preferences. Just personally feel that PHP is getting obsolete, bloated, slow and prone to security issues.
Great advantage of going for static HTML with javascript us that it immediately eliminates almost all security issues as there is nothing to hack, it is all just public HTML and Javascript. Apart from your compile time Node.js stack that is only needed at compile time.
Modern frameworks like React can do almost everything with client side Javascript that PHP can, just with creating static resources. And what it cannot do can be done by adding backend server components.
And it is completely possible to have your own Node.js stack completely without any cloud components. But personally like cloud as I do not want to maintain a server, very happy to have AWS doing that for me with serverless components. Especially as it with no additional effort or cost provides me with a global CDN, making the page just as snappy in Singapore, as in Amsterdam or San Francisco. But it certainly is not needed to use cloud.

By the way: if anything is proven old school web pages technology, it is static HTML pages ;-) Only the way they are created is new. And the Javascripting of course. And indeed, interactive elements won't work with no-script enabled in the browser.

Anyway: will stop nagging. Of course perfectly fine if you prefer PHP ;-)
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Symoon
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by Symoon »

From an Oric forums user point of view, not knowing what can be acheived in detail or not with one techno or another, I prefer the look and feel of this forum than the CEO one for instance (which is using Wordpress if I'm not mistaken). I can't explain exactly, but to me the CEO one seems harder to read, less concise, requiring lots of scrolling to have an overview (6,5 screens of scrolling, while this forum makes it on two screens, for almost the same amount of topics).
At the beginning I thought I'd get used to it, but it still bothers me actually.
Maybe just a creator point of wiew, not sure if it's more or less the default look being used in both cases?
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Dbug
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by Dbug »

Symoon wrote: Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:53 pm Maybe just a creator point of wiew, not sure if it's more or less the default look being used in both cases?
The Defence-Force forum is basically running a stock pro-silver theme, with just some small tweaks to the colors and logo.

An earlier version had some extensive changes, but that was a pain to update to later versions of phpBB.

I kind of like the current version.

And I agree that the CEO site is fancy and very modern, and I never find what I'm looking for so I stopped using it.
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xahmol
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by xahmol »

The CEO site is everything but fancy and modern IMHO.
And indeed, the forum is terrible. Apart from it being rather francophonic.

And it is indeed using Wordpress. So still PHP 😉
Only advantage would be is that Wordpress generally is much quicker in solving security issues than phpBB is.
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rax
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Re: Next forum upgrade

Post by rax »

Dbug wrote: Mon Jan 09, 2023 8:33 am I'd like the site to still be usable with no-script enabled.

Personally I like PHP, I'm not trying to use the latest web tech, I don't find that interesting or pleasant, the website is a side hobby and PHP honestly has no more problems than any other web tech.

90% of the techs people were using when I started this site are now forgotten or just appeared as bleeps on the technological landscape.

Not relying on the cloud means that the system is more or less self-sufficient, easy to migrate to another server, there are no API keys, no dependencies on things that may be gone 5 years from now.

It's basically what I wrote at the end off this article
I like this answer!
Also I saw many technologies that were said to replace it but are no longer alive. I've used PHP to convert data for some of the ORIC games and other ORIC stuff.
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