phpBB • Creating Communities Worldwide

Compared to phpBB3, links in phpBB2 had a slightly different behaviour: When you clicked them, they opened a new window with the requested page. This was changed in phpBB3 for a couple of reasons, but one of the most important ones was the goal to achieve XHTML 1.0 Strict-validation for the whole board.


If you still want to get the same behaviour on your new phpBB3 board, there are a couple of small modifications have you to make, which this guide should hopefully explain in enough detail.

Modifying auto-detected links

First of all, make auto-detected links (those that you didn't wrap with the url-BBCode) open new windows when getting clicked. Therefor open the includes/functions_content.php and look for following line (which should be around line 592):

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    $html    = "$whitespace<!-- $tag --><a$class href=\"$url\">$text</a><!-- $tag -->$append";
            

And replace it with following line:

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    if ($type == MAGIC_URL_EMAIL)
    {
        $html    = "$whitespace<!-- $tag --><a$class href=\"$url\">$text</a><!-- $tag -->$append";    
    }
    else 
    {
        $html    = "$whitespace<!-- $tag --><a$class href=\"$url\" onclick=\"window.open(this.href);return false;\">$text</a><!-- $tag -->$append";
    } 

BBCode URLs

Next open the bbcode.html of your style (if you're using prosilver, this would be the styles/prosilver/template/bbcode.html file) and look for following line:

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<!-- BEGIN url --><a href="{URL}" class="postlink">{DESCRIPTION}</a><!-- END url -->


Now replace it with this line:

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<!-- BEGIN url --><a href="{URL}" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" class="postlink">{DESCRIPTION}</a><!-- END url -->


Help phpBB read the output again

Last but not least, you should also do the following change which will allow the created HTML output to be parsed again by phpBB: Open the includes/functions.php and replace this segment which you should find around line 2740...

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      case 'bbcode_htm':
         return array(
            '#<!\-\- e \-\-><a href="mailto:(.*?)">.*?</a><!\-\- e \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- l \-\-><a (?:class="[\w-]+" )?href="(.*?)(?:(&amp;|\?)sid=[0-9a-f]{32})?">.*?</a><!\-\- l \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- ([mw]) \-\-><a (?:class="[\w-]+" )?href="(.*?)">.*?</a><!\-\- \1 \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- s(.*?) \-\-><img src="\{SMILIES_PATH\}\/.*? \/><!\-\- s\1 \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- .*? \-\->#s',
            '#<.*?>#s',
         );

... with this one:

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      case 'bbcode_htm':
         return array(
            '#<!\-\- e \-\-><a href="mailto:(.*?)">.*?</a><!\-\- e \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- l \-\-><a (?:class="[\w-]+" )?href="(.*?)(?:(&amp;|\?)sid=[0-9a-f]{32})?" onclick="window\.open\(this\.href\);return false;">.*?</a><!\-\- l \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- ([mw]) \-\-><a (?:class="[\w-]+" )?href="(.*?)" onclick="window\.open\(this\.href\);return false;">.*?</a><!\-\- \1 \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- s(.*?) \-\-><img src="\{SMILIES_PATH\}\/.*? \/><!\-\- s\1 \-\->#',
            '#<!\-\- .*? \-\->#s',
            '#<.*?>#s',
         );

And since you've updated also a template file, don't forget to also purge your board's cache through the respective button on the frontpage of your board's admin panel.