MyBB 1.6.9 Security Release

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MyBB 1.6.9 is now available from the MyBB website and is a security release for the 1.6 series.

What’s added/changed in this version?

It has come to our attention that there is an SQL injection vulnerability in all versions of MyBB, including MyBB 1.6.8. We advise all MyBB forum owners to upgrade their forum as soon as possible.

With thanks to frostschutz and StefanT for finding and reporting these issues.

Vulnerabilities fixed:

  • High Risk: An SQL vulnerability when editing a post
  • Medium Risk: CAPTCHA systems non effective, providing possible brute-force access

Bugs fixed:

  • An issue with the editor not working in Firefox 16 and above

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Upgrading from 1.6.8 and Other Versions

Before performing any upgrade please remember to backup your forum’s files and database and store them safely. If you have edited core files, including language files, please make sure you make a changelog for these changes so you can make them again once the upgrade is complete.

To upgrade, follow the Upgrading process. The upgrade script is required. There are changes to 1 language file (messages.lang.php). There are changes to 3 templates (portal_welcome_guesttext, loginbox & codebuttons).

If you’re using MyBB 1.6.8

If you’re using MyBB 1.6.7 or below

Reporting MyBB Security Vulnerabilities

If you think you’ve found a vulnerability in MyBB, we advise you not to publicly post it on these forums or publicly release information about it elsewhere until we’ve had time to prepare and release a patch.

As always, you can send through security related messages on the MyBB website from the Contact Us page or in our Private Inquiries forum – where you can start a new thread that only you and the MyBB Team can see.

Thank you,

MyBB Team

Using Pirated Mods

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Recently we have been made aware of several MyBB plugins circulating around the internet, in particular pirated mods, which are specifically designed to cause malicious harm to their users. One specific example which has come to our attention attempts to delete all the records from your database, and delete your MyBB files. This would obviously have a devastating impact on anyone who happened to install this plugin.

We’d like to remind users of the immense power plugins have which, when used incorrectly, could pose security implications for your forum.  Theme files also can contain backdoor PHP scripts which can grant access to your server.  Therefore, great care should be taken both in terms of which plugins are installed and where the modifications were obtained from. Specifically, nulled or pirated mods pose the biggest threat of all given that the origin of the file is unknown and any sharer could have inserted malicious code.

Even when downloading mods directly from the author we recommend thoroughly researching both the plugin/theme and the author to establish that they are reputable and have a good standing with their customers and users.

If you have any further questions, concerns or examples please don’t hesitate to contact us via the Private Inquiries forum.

Regards, The MyBB Team.

MyBB 1.8 Tour: The Retirement of Supertux

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As MyBB approaches its 10th-year anniversary it’s quite easy for us to dwell on history. Even with the changes we’re working on in MyBB 1.8 you can still compare the early versions of our product to our next major release and see that they are made from the same group of people. Despite the dozens of Developers, SQA Testers, Support Team members, PR guys and Management we’ve had over this time, who have each made their mark in their own way, the consistency of MyBB as a forum system at its core is one of the fundamental mantras of the MyBB Group.

With that in mind, whenever we do come to develop around a feature, we’re cautious to remove the legacy it might leave behind. It is often a tough decision between moving forward and embracing something new and doing what we know. MyBB 1.8 gives us a great chance to look around and research how to improve these features for our users; with around 40 planned research projects into different areas of MyBB we’re aiming to bring a higher level of usability and functionality to your forum.

Avatar Changes

With Gravatar, an avatar hosting service, being integrated into WordPress, Redmine and GitHub (alongside other websites and many 3rd party addons for other software) it brings together an opportunity for us to provide a consistent platform for users to have the same look wherever they go. In MyBB 1.8 you can now use your Gravatar email in the Avatar URL field. Options in the ACP allow Administrators to control the content of avatars with Gravatar’s age-based rating systems.

Changing Avatar

The MyBB 1.8 Change Avatar

Alongside Gravatar is our new format_avatar function. This introduces the ability to pass a user’s avatar information to a single function to work out the correct dimensions to display on the page; it also means we aren’t parsing the same avatar twice for the same user on the same page. If the user has no avatar set Administrators are able to set a default avatar from the ACP to use instead.

These changes do come with some sad news; in MyBB 1.8, we’ve removed the avatar gallery feature. We’ll all be disappointed to see the end of Supertux and Mr Spam but we thought it best to keep a clear and simple method to change user avatars in which the avatar gallery was a much non-used feature to the majority of forums.

News and Version Check Changes

One of the main aims of MyBB 1.8 is to help improve the services we offer to our own users. This involves keeping users up to date about what’s happening and new versions of MyBB.

News Feed in the ACP

News Feed in the ACP

In the ACP, we’ve introduced a small news feed into the Dashboard. We’ve also moved the Version Check, which used to have its own section, into the Dashboard too so that all updates are in the same place right in front of administrators. A new task is to be added to regularly check for any updates (versions and news) rather than relying on users to catch the ‘Your last version check was…’ message that may otherwise be easily missed.

The Little Things

Some of the other, smaller changes to MyBB 1.8 come to fix those trivial things people may (or may not) have noticed. These include removing the option to rate your own thread and changing trim() in templates to rtrim() so that those with OCD can create pretty source code for their themes.

We’re also looking to provide public access to our GitHub repositories in the very near future where a few problems have stopped us from doing so sooner. As soon as the MyBB 1.8 theme changes are ready we’ll also be making that project available too – alongside development standards for non-team members for those who want to get involved in helping us create the best free forum software.

Changes on the Team

Many will have noticed some changes on the team recently. We’ve welcomed back on-board Polarbear541 to our SQA Team and StefanT and Nathan Malcolm have moved over from SQA to the Development Team. All have quickly jumped into their new roles and we’re looking forward to their contributions.

Joining the Team

Being apart of the MyBB family and developing the future of forum software is no small task. Being volunteers takes dedication and patience as well as the skills to pull off your role. Take a look at Joining the Team, and if you meet the descriptions, send us an application – we’d love to have you on the Team!

Mods Site Tour

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You’ve been hearing this for months, if not years by now: the new Mods site is coming soon.
That was in fact, always true. However, the person who was working on it had to leave the team last year and left us his work.
Since I offered myself to do the Mods site, I decided to start from scratch and create a plugin instead of a separate website – that would make integration much easier.
I started back in October 2011 and by now the Mods site is almost fully operational – apart from the Plugin Translations feature and a few final touches, everything is done! It has been tested thoroughly by me and the rest of the team and even though it’s not perfect, it does what we wanted to just fine.

Now let’s get to what’s really important: what’s changed? how does it work? what’s new?
The entire Mods site is now based on a single word: collaboration.
You will now be able to have people working on the same project as you, contributing to it, discussing it…in one single place.

Major features:

  • Collaboration
  • Control Panel
  • Builds
  • Bug Tracker
  • Suggestions


Collaboration
When you create a project (no matter what kind of project is – a plugin, graphic, whatever) you will be considered the author of that project.
As the author, you can invite other people to become collaborators of your project and help you with it – being it as a tester, developer or anything else.

Control Panel
The Control Panel is the place where you can view what’s going on over the projects you work on and of course, manage invitations from other users.
Another feature of the Control Panel is the one that lets you create a project (for obvious reasons, this is the most important one).
When you create a project you are required to submit an initial build and that project will be set for “Awaiting Approval” unless you are considered an “Approved Developer”.
An “Approved Developer” is someone we think has gained enough confidence from us to believe that any project created by that person is safe for the end user.

Builds
Every project is now built around builds. That is, whenever you want to upload a new change you just submit a new build (a ZIP containing the latest data).
That build is automatically considered “dev” and can be downloaded by anyone. When you think you’ve reached a stable status, you can switch (requires approval) to “stable”.
The latest stable build is the one that appears on the download page – don’t worry, you can browse a list of builds and download any.
Builds may only be submitted by the author and its collaborators.

Bug Tracker
Is there a better way to have a stable project than having a bug tracker built-in with the new system? We thought one would be very important and decided to implement it.
You can decide if it’s private (author only) and if collaborators can access it or not or even give access to certain users who are not direct collaborators.
If you don’t agree with us and don’t like bug trackers or have a bug tracker somewhere else, you can even link to that one if you wish and disable the default one.

The way the bug tracker works is similar to the way Redmine works so if you’re used to work with Redmine you will not find strange to work with this one – but of course, don’t expect it to be thaaaaaat powerful, I only have got two hands!

Suggestions
Receiving feedback from users is very important if you want to create amazing software. Because of that, we decided to implement a Suggestions page in which users can give suggestions for your project.
If you don’t like it, feel free to disable it, it’s all up to you!

Other Features
Besides those major features, the Mods site also contains a few others which make it even better:
* Previews – you can now manage your project preview images in a much better way than before.
* Translations – plugin projects are the only ones who have got translations and can be easily managed by collaborators – only they can submit translations.
* Change Log – whenever you submit a new build, you are required to enter a change log. The change log of the project is the combination of every build’s change log.
* Recommended – we got rid of the project ratings. You can recommend projects but not give any rating.
* Statistics – this page shows you relevant information about the most downloaded projects as well as the most recommended ones.
* Mod CP – Projects and Builds can be easily managed from the Mod CP which speeds up the approval process.
* Whenever an update is awaiting approval, users can still download the latest stable (or any other) build without problems.
* If the project hasn’t been updated for more than 6 months, you will see that information when viewing the project page.
* Support – a new link has been added to the project page which links to the Plugin Support forum on the MyBB Community. However, project authors can change that link to their site’s URL if they wish.
* Optionally, users may enter their PayPal email address which will result in a Donate button being shown on the project page.

We hope you are still excited about it. We are too. We really want to push this live as soon as possible but as you know, we all do this on our free time. One thing is certain though: we want to release this at the same time as MyBB 1.8 (or perhaps sooner!).

Thank you!

MyBB 1.8 Tour: July Update

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Since we announced MyBB 1.8 back in April work towards making a public beta has been slow. This time of year is traditionally the busiest for the team members with exams, workloads and personal projects – not to the mention most of us enjoying the summer (or lack of, in some cases!) – often taking over from our usual MyBB duties. Where we were once working on the code every day there has been weeks without anything being done at all. This is, unfortunately, the perils of volunteer work.

We know you’re all just as excited about MyBB 1.8 as we are, and we haven’t told you everything that is changing yet, so we’re stepping it up a gear to put it all together as fast as we can without compromising our new features. We’ve tried setting deadlines (and failing miserably) and I know you’re sick of the usual ready-when-it’s-ready story so all I can say is please bear with us. We’ll be working hard to bring you this feature update and that starts with our move to GitHub.

Git Migration

Part of the fallout from when MyBB.com was partly taken over was to have an overview look at how we do things behind the scenes to see if we could improve our services. This understandably has a knock-on effect on our development; we decided it was best to drop SVN and move to GitHub ahead of the 1.8 schedule. MyBB 1.6 development also happens over there too.

We’ve briefly hidden the 1.6 repository so that our team can get used to this new service and for us to sort out some new standards for developers and contributors to follow. This is a pretty big change not only for users but for our team as well so we need to take some time to get used to it too.

That being said, we haven’t quite got rid of everything. We will still be using the development site – powered by Redmine – as the central place to report bugs and issues with MyBB and the Merge System. It is up and running but we are having a few problems syncing the repository on GitHub and our local copy here. We hope to have this – and the GitHub project – up and running soon.

Consistency in 1.8

A general trait that has been hanging over 1.8 during planning and early development is consistency; making sure everything we do looks and feels the same as though it is from the same product, system and service. Everything from MyBB.com to the install process on your own forums will be getting a makeover to the new upgraded style giving MyBB in general a clean modern look. We’ve replaced the popular FamFamFam icons with the equally popular Fugue icon set to give 1.8’s UX (user experience) a fresh appeal – meaning 1.8 uses CSS buttons and carries PNG icons instead of GIFs. We’re looking into providing sprite images too for the ever-conscious large forum owner as well as providing theme artists a new opportunity with this style of coding.

1.8 Installer and Postbit

1.8 Installer and Postbit

Alongside the jQuery update and base colours, 1.8 themes are sure to be some of the best in the series.

Full Feature Update

So, as you might have thought by now, MyBB 1.8 is going to be a bigger update than most people imagined. While not 2.0-esque, it will certainly provide a full feature update that will require careful planning and action. And, to settle the nerves of the plugin developers, there will be no major updates to the plugin system – meaning for the majority only the compatibility section of your plugins will need updated for them work in 1.8.

By providing an update like this we hope to extend the life of the 1.x series while also providing the tools and processes for developers to create even more amazing themes and plugins. It also gives us, as a team, a chance to rebalance our own structure to provide a better product for you all to enjoy.

Access to community forums restored, modifications site underway, updates & FAQ

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Following on from our We’ll be back soon post yesterday, I just wanted to provide an update on our recovery efforts as well as address a few of the commonly asked questions.

After a comprehensive investigation, including audits of all files on our existing servers as well as an analysis of server and website access logs, we’re happy to confidently say that we do not believe any of our servers were compromised, or our databases accessed.

As you’ve likely noticed, access to the MyBB Community Forums has now been restored. Because we don’t believe the MyBB database was compromised, we have opted to not require users to change their passwords on next login. If you’re having difficulty accessing the forums (for example, if it’s redirecting to http://www.mybb.com, or stylesheets aren’t loading correctly), then please clear your web browser cache and try again.

We’re working on restoring access to the MyBB Mods website as soon as we can, however expect the modifications site take another 24 hours before it can be pushed live.

Our team are also busy working on relaunching the official MyBB documentation, using GitHub Pages. We’re moving away from MediaWiki and wiki-based documentation primarily because we believe our efforts are best focused on maintaining our core website, forums and modifications site rather than managing a slew of third-party applications (this is the same reason why our blog is now powered by WordPress.com). Because GitHub Pages is directly backed to a Git repository, the entire community can still collaborate to our documentation using pull requests.

At this stage, we plan to discontinue the MyBB Ideas site. We believe that through great collaboration on the MyBB Community Forums in our MyBB 1.8 Feature Suggestions and MyBB 2.0 Feature Suggestions forums, together we can build even greater software. It also means there’s one less place to collect feedback from.

We’re taking an overly cautious process with the restoration. If we chose to, we could simply flick all services on again, and have the wiki, modifications site, etc live. Instead, even though we’re confident there was no breach of our servers, we’re still handling the situation if there were. Before anything is relaunched, we’re:

  • Verifying access logs of the site to look for suspicious behavior
  • Verifying the content of the sites by comparing them against previously taken backups (both onsite and offsite, and against backups taken recently and those taken weeks ago) and analysing each and every difference by hand
  • Pushing the content of all websites to our new servers from an offline copy, instead of our old servers
  • Verifying that all of our websites work behind CloudFlare, and implementing caching strategies in CloudFlare to give you even faster page loads

There’s also been a lot of discussion around what legal action we will be taking against those that have attacked us. At this stage, we believe our time and effort is better spent improving and educating users about security, and moving forward with the development of MyBB 1.8, MyBB 2.0, and our rebranding.

Again, we want to thank everyone for their support and patience and look forward to moving onwards and upwards!

Regards,

Chris, Tim, and the rest of the MyBB Team

We’ll be back soon

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As most of you who will be reading this are aware, three days ago (beginning the 31st of May) the MyBB.com domain (along with our other domains) were hijacked by a group of hackers (we’re not going to identify them by name but they have been very vocal in claiming responsibility so you should have no problem finding them if you’re so inclined). They also tried to access our server and many other services we use.

At this stage we have access to all our systems back and are in the process of restoring services, however we’re pleased to say that we are also taking this opportunity to retool components of our website and upgrade our server infrastructure.

This blog post will probably be the first of many, but we’ll endeavor to keep you updated as much as possible regarding progress. At this stage we don’t expect all services to be online for at least a week while the new servers are configured and we prepare new components of our website, however this blog is obviously already online and the MyBB home page will be up very soon too.

The story to date

There are still a few missing pieces, but at this stage we have a pretty clear understanding of what happened. Contrary to what has been posted elsewhere, we do not believe social engineering was the culprit, although the hackers did try unsuccessfully to gain access to several of our accounts via this method.

The main incident that lead to the breach was a compromise of Chris’ personal Apple ID (iCloud, etc) account. From there, the hackers were able to reset passwords to our hosting and domain accounts. It’s still not clear how they got access to this account, however they also had numerous personal details about Chris, including contact details and knowledge of at least the last four numbers of his primary credit card.

Fortunately SoftLayer (our host) called Chris when his password was reset which alerted us to the situation unfolding and all public access to the server was shut off soon thereafter. As far we can tell they were not able to log into our server and do not have copies of our databases. We have been very pleased by the response we received from SoftLayer and without their vigilance the situation could have been far worse.

While Chris was trying to reset his passwords to NameCheap (our Domain Registrar at the time) and Apple ID accounts, the hackers even went as far as to remote wipe his iPhone via iCloud to prevent him from having 3G access. Unfortunately they successfully took control of Chris’s NameCheap account and redirected the domain to their defacement page, later we discovered they even tried to transfer the domain.

Unfortunately we did not get the expedited response from NameCheap that we would have hoped for given the severity of the situation, and it was about six hours before we got access to our account back. As a result we have already transferred MyBB.com to another domain registrar with better controls around account security.

Since then we have been planning the recovery effort, including taking the opportunity to improve our infrastructure.  We will be moving to a new server setup, but given our security scare a few months ago we are also auditing the site software we use and only moving what we know is clean to the new server. More details on changes to the site are detailed further down this article.

With regard to why we were targeted, frankly we are baffled by the logic. The group identified MyBB as being targeted because one of our user’s runs an online forum dedicated to hacking. By this same analogy, if someone purchases a car and then uses it to run someone down or damage another’s property, then the manufacturer of the car should be responsible, which is obviously corrupted logic.

The group totes freedom as their cause but by attacking an Open Source project they are undermining freedom in every sense of the word. Anyone is free to download and use our software, no matter if you’re rich or poor, a nurse or a hacker, and the fact they targeted us for this is an utter contradiction of their reasoning.

As many MyBB users will know, we don’t even offer support on our community forums to hacking sites, and there are no exceptions. We can only conclude that attention and notoriety are their true motivations, and that their sense of ethics is a disgrace to the online community. We sincerely hope the perpetrators are brought to justice.

What we’re doing

First and foremost we have adopted two factor authentication wherever possible. As mentioned above, the domain names have already been transferred to a registrar offering two factor authentication, among other security features. We’ll also be adopting two factor authentication on our new servers, and to various internal services. The new servers should improve performance of our website, and CloudFlare has also been setup.

As you might have also noticed, this blog has already been moved from being a locally hosted WordPress installation to being hosted on WordPress.com, which should ensure it is accessible even when our servers are down. We are hoping to make a similar change to the wiki before services are fully restored and as previously announced, development will be moving to GitHub with 1.8. Our goal with moving services offsite is to improve availability, improve maintainability, reduce load on our servers and improve security.

Finally,  although our website infrastructure did not contribute to the intrusion, we are reviewing the security of all our services prior to moving them to our new server to ensure our systems are as secure as they could be.

We thank everyone for their continued patience and support over this difficult time and hope to have everything back online soon.

Regards,

Chris, Tim, and the rest of the MyBB Team

MyBB 1.6.8 Released – Maintenance Release

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MyBB 1.6.8 is now available from the MyBB website and is a general maintenance release.

What’s added/changed in this version?

This release fixes over 40 reported issues causing incorrect functionality of MyBB. Please be aware that to be able to provide easy to manage updates not all issues have been fixed in this version.

Please view the 1.6.8 changes in the wiki for more information about the changes in this version.

Standards Update

About half of the files that have changed in this version have been updated to match MyBB Development Standards. A full list of actual changed files (files with bug fixes) and standards changes are available from the Wiki.

These standards include removing whitespace at the end of files and ensuring they are encoded properly.

Upgrading from 1.6.7 and Other Versions

Before performing any upgrade please remember to backup your forum’s files and database and store them safely. If you have edited core files, including language files, please make sure you make a changelog for these changes so you can make them again (if necessary) once the upgrade is complete.

To upgrade, follow the Upgrading process. The upgrade script is required. There are changes to 4 language files (with 23 having standard updates). 2 templates have been changed.

If you’re using MyBB 1.6.7

If you’re using MyBB 1.6.6 or lower

Reporting MyBB security vulnerabilities

If you think you’ve found a vulnerability in MyBB, we advise you not to publicly post it on these forums or publicly release information about it elsewhere until we’ve had time to prepare and release a patch.

As always, you can send through security related messages on the MyBB website from the Contact Us page or in our Private Inquiries forum – where you can start a new thread that only you and the MyBB Team can see.

Thanks,

MyBB Team

Dennis Tsang answers your questions

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Dennis Tsang has been with the team for a long time, playing numerous important roles and having a lot of input over the years. He took some time to answer your questions!

Being one of the more active, long-time members, what keeps you coming back to MyBB?

MyBB is so easy to work with. The core is easy to understand and use; it’s lean and lightweight. It’s simple to customize. In terms of the community, it’s the perfect size where people can get to know each other and help each other out. There are wonderful developers and themers who produce awesome themes.

Other than MyBB, what are some of your hobbies?

I volunteer with a couple of youth groups, namely youth ministry at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Vancouver, B.C. I am on the council of the S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Youth Leadership Millennium Program.

I am a transit enthusiast and photographer. I love buses and trains. My transit photography can be found at BusTrainFerry.com.

What is it about public transport that you’re so interested in?

I’m most interested in the systems behind public transit operations. For example, here in Vancouver we have a metro line called the SkyTrain, which is fully automated. The automation has intrigued me since I was young and I’ve been trying to figure out how it all works. The vehicles themselves (both buses and trains) are also an interest of mine — the skill required by operators to maneuver the buses through traffic is astounding.

What is your favourite movie?

The Matrix.

Are you as excited about MyBB as you first were about it?

Yes of course. The advent of MyBB 2.0 is very exciting as it’s the first rewrite we’ve done since the inception of the project itself. The web has changed very dramatically in the past few years from both technical and social standpoints. MyBB 2.0 will hopefully take forum software to the next level by harnessing new concepts and technologies and making a usable package in the age of Web 2.0 and beyond, while still maintaining our core roots of powerfulness, simplicity, and extensibility.

What career do you hope to achieve after completion of your course?

Later this year I will be starting as a software developer at A Thinking Ape. Software has always been an interest of mine, and that’s why I went into Computer Science. My particular interests are in mobile and web technologies.

The best day of your life was…

The day I was born.

In your opinion, what is the most underused feature of MyBB?

Threaded Mode on the show thread page. I’ve never used it. Do you use it?

How long can you hold your breath for?

At least the length of the George Massey Tunnel.

Anything else you’d like to add?

It’s been a pleasure to be on the MyBB team. It’s always enjoyable to see people who use our software and love MyBB as much as we as staff do.

Get your questions answered

They can be general to all/any staff or specific to one member, either way, post them in the Questions for team members thread and I’ll ask them if appropriate. A lot of staff have been answering questions in the thread too, so it’s a great ‘open discussion’ thread too! Thank you.

MyBB 1.8 Tour: Introduction

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On April 1st we announced a 1.6.7 Update which updated both MyBB and the Merge System. If you haven’t seen this or not upgraded yet please make sure you read the MyBB and Merge System 1.6.7 Release blog post. We also announced our plans for MyBB 1.8; it was no April Fool.

Back in 2010, just under 2 years ago, we released MyBB 1.6 which introduced over 40 new features – some more at home in commercial software. As MyBB’s popularity continues to grow, the rise of social networks, rival software and the greater expectations of users old and new gives us some of the hardest challenges we’ve faced; to stay on top, to deliver a brilliant product and provide it to you for free.

With our development roadmap for MyBB 2.0 getting underway soon, we quickly felt the need to bridge the large gap that would have been 1.6 to 2.0. We wanted to create something that would provide a legacy to users of the 1.x series – the best of the best – and there was only one way we could get that to our users; MyBB 1.8.

What You Can Expect From 1.8

Whereas 1.2, 1.4 and 1.6 delivered over 100 new features 1.8 aims to be more of a subtle upgrade, a facelift and a move to more open source development so that others too can help create the best free forum software. We’ll of course be providing the usual bug fixes and working with large forum owners to see if we can help further improve performance and stability. MyBB 1.8 is a perfect chance for us to provide changes that we couldn’t typically do within our maintenance cycles.

A New Look

When we announced our new logo and mascot, Bolt, the Team soon realised that we didn’t want to wait until 2.0 was released to use them. The 1.6 default theme made these look out of place in its dated design (which was last updated in 2008) so we needed something more up to date. Justin, our lead designer, who created the Apart theme series (from which many MyBB communities either use or have customised the look for themselves) has worked on developing the series for the new 1.8 default theme. We worked together to figure out a method for enabling the Apart colours to be included by default but without the need for including 14 separate themes before the administrator even opened their forum. This method is what we call attachable base colours.

The new default theme for MyBB 1.8

These changes to the theme system allow you to create colours to which you can attach stylesheets (just like you can attach stylesheets to pages). You can also set a display order for all your stylesheets so that they can override styles. Together, the changes mean you can add a theme with as many custom colours as you want. Using the parent/child theme structure that already exists in 1.x you can restrict or allow certain usergroups to use these colours and, as they inherit the main stylesheets, they’re very easy to manage. So, there is no longer the need to install a dozen different themes just for a different colour header.

A New Look Admin Control Panel (ACP)

Along with the new default theme there needs to be a new look Admin Control Panel (ACP). Our ACP is regarded as one of the easiest to use; it’s friendly and we didn’t want to change it much. Instead, we gave it a similar Apart makeover to our front-end.

Screenshot of the MyBB 1.8 ACP

Please note that along with the default theme the look may change as development continues.

Powered by jQuery

While 1.8 won’t be able to make your cocoa or project your forum’s logo onto the moon, much to our disappointment, we really weren’t pulling a prank on this one; MyBB 1.8 will be powered by jQuery. The lighter and more powerful JavaScript library should be able to extend what both Theme Artists and Plugin Developers are able to do without causing conflicts or heavy loading pages. Both front-end and back-end will use the library. This change is probably the most destructive for themes and plugins in the 1.8 upgrade and we’ll be providing support throughout its beta period ready for a main release. In total, including the changes to the default theme, about 20 templates require updating from 1.6.

Along with jQuery comes a change in post editor. Although I’ve had my eye on an ‘off the shelf’ editor for quite some time we’ve yet to make a decision on whether we write our own or not; we’ll be covering that in a future tour. However, please don’t suggest which editor to use as our aim is to make it interchangeable so you can use your favourite one.

Trash Can

One of the most requested features for MyBB is a trash can – or as I prefer, the ability to recover deleted posts. In 1.8, you’ll be able to decide if a user’s deleted post is obliterated forever or is recoverable via the Mod CP. Global and usergroup permissions will allow this to be controlled across your users.

Spam Improvements

For those of you waiting for Spam Ninja I’m very sorry to disappoint as I did promise it to you last year. As soon as 1.8 was decided, I stopped developing it as a plugin and started integrating relevant parts into the core instead. We’ll be looking to improve spam prevention and detection in 1.8 which we’ll cover in a future tour.

Upgrading to 1.8

Upgrading to 1.8 will be similar to upgrading from 1.4 to 1.6; many plugins will only need to change their compatibility line and will only need some major changes if they use Prototype JavaScript, use login functions or make large theme changes. Throughout the beta period, we’ll be upgrading the Wiki with new information and providing support to plugin developers to help them with their new plugins.

Github

The Team has been trying to plan a move away from our current SVN setup to the popular social coding site Github for some time. We’ve come up against problems but feel confident that now is the time to open up our development to people outside of the MyBB Team. Github can be an extremely powerful tool for development and it is something we’re eager to do – we have been working on 1.8 in secret in one of our repositories there which will be made available after our first beta release.

We’ve gone outside of our usual box with 1.8 in that we’re actually telling you what we’re doing and what we’re planning even though none of this is public. We’re aiming to provide a beta of 1.8 in May so please be patient while we’re polishing our development and removing all the takeaways and soft drink cans.

Wrap

With MyBB 1.8, our aim is to fully complete the series with features and improvements that make us a better rival not only to our free forum software friends but also to commercial community software too. We want to make it more friendly, faster and go further than any of our products have been before. Everyone here at MyBB is looking forward to 1.8 and hope you are too!

See you at the next tour!

Tomm