PhpBB 3.0 was released yesterday and it was received well by its lovers. The news hit the Digg FrontPage quite quickly. PhpBB 3.0 was released 6 years after PhpBB 2.0 was released. For those of you who don’t know what PhpBB is, it is one of the most popular Forum CMS (Content Management Software) and that too Open Source. Which means that it is free and there is a vast community which is always ready to help you with your queries.

PhpBB 3.0 has got a lot of extra features than its little brother PhpBB 2.0 like a new theme called ProSilver, a resynchronise or reset overview section, a nicely setup board Statistics section, a cookie handling tool, a new moderator control panel and nicely arranged tabs.

The download was a mere 2 MB and installation was also a charm. Just download the file and installed it on my computer using EasyPhp (Let me keep that for another post). It just took me 2 minutes in all this process. The installation was speedy and anybody with zero experience in installing scripts like this can do it without a glitch. Every step can be easily understood and info is provided as necessary. The colour combination in the default theme is also nice. While I miss the Traditional SubSilver theme (It is bundled though), the new theme reminded me of Joomla’s default theme. The search section is developed the most and is the only thing that will make anybody to upgrade to the latest version. I also liked the new feature of showing new messages at the top, just like vBulletein. It also takes only one click to view all posts posted by a user which in case of vBulletein takes almost 4 clicks. I also like the way they have clearly divided the admin interface into various self explaining tabs like General, Forums, posting, Users and Groups, Permissions, Styles, Maintenance and System. Like in the WordPress 2.3, there is a feature which lets you Look for the Latest updates(WordPress has this feature only for Plug-ins), but unlike WordPress lets you update your script with a single click.

My Verdict: If you are using PhpBB as your Forum script, you are missing the best part of it if you don’t upgrade it to the latest version. And Ya! Did I mention anywhere that this version is super-fast.