History of phpBB™
phpBB was first created by James Atkinson (theFinn) in June 2000 as a UBB-like forum solution for his wife. Once released to the public through SourceForge, it gained popularity very quickly, and by December of the same year v1.0.0 was released.
Two additional major releases, 1.2 and 1.4, were made in February and April of 2001. During this time, the development team expanded to include Bart van Bragt (BartVB) and Paul S. Owen (psoTFX).
Work on phpBB 2.0.x began in February of 2001. phpBB2 was built entirely from scratch, and took an entire year to complete. Finally, in April of 2002, phpBB 2.0.0 was made available to the public. The 2.0.x line of phpBB has since risen to become the most successful opensource bulletin board software worldwide.
Work on phpBB 2.2 was started almost immediately and continued over the following years. On January 14, 2005, it was announced that phpBB 2.2 would be no more. Due to the large scale changes made to the codebase and the lack of backwards compatibility with phpBB 2.0.x., it was decided that the next version of phpBB would have to be 3.0.0, as is required under the Linux Kernal numbering system. Thus, phpBB3 “Olympus” was born.
The new phpBB.com website presenting phpBB3 Beta5 was made available in March 2007. The first release candidate, marking full support for the 3.0 line, was published in May of 2007. phpBB 3.0.0 was released on December 13th 2007.