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We are pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB3 Beta1 package. With this first beta release we are officially starting the beta testing phase. Below are some guidelines regarding the first beta as well as the download locations.
Obtaining Support
During the beta phase a minimal level of support will be given. We will provide answers to general setup questions, configuration problems and support for determining common problems mostly related to bugs. We will not support modifications, custom code/style additions or any users using the beta packages within a live environment.
For some support questions we may ask you to re-install the beta, clean tables in the database, purge data or other actions which are not advised to do in a live environment. So please be aware that you are still on your own if you run the beta in such an environment.
Beginning with the release candidates full support will of course be given.
Updating Beta to RC/Final releases
We may provide update paths for going from the beta releases to the RC and final release, but we may also not provide them. This highly depends on how the beta phase evolves. So please be aware that your test installation will need to be replaced/removed if a new beta is announced.
A full update path will be provided beginning with the Release Candidates.
Missing elements
Within the beta packages we do not include several features. These are the updater and the conversion tool for converting phpBB 2.0.x (and other packages) to phpBB 3.0.x. These might be included with later Betas, but certainly with the first Release Candidate.
Minimum Requirements
phpBB3 has a few requirements which must be met before you are able to install and use it.
- A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System with support for PHP
- A SQL database system, one of:
- MySQL 3.23 or above (MySQLi supported)
- PostgreSQL 7.x
- SQLite
- Firebird 1.5+/Interbase 7.1+
- MS SQL Server 2000 or above (directly or via ODBC)
- Oracle
- PHP 4.3.3 or above with support for the database you intend to use.
- These optional presence of the following modules within PHP will provide access to additional features, but they are not required.
- zlib Compression support
- Remote FTP support
- XML support
- Imagemagick support
Security
If security issues arise we won't release a new beta immediatly. They will be fixed within the CVS tree and incorporated into the next beta packages. So please be aware that you may be at risk if you run the beta in a live environment while security issues arise. Security issues found should be reported to our security tracker in the usual way.
Translations
With the first beta we encourage potential translators to get used to the new language system. During this beta phase we will separately announce the availability of our new language pack management system.
Please be aware that all language files within the acp directory will change a lot during the beta phase, since we will review them in regard of grammatical correctness as well as adjusting the wording of links.
Documentation
An initial quick start guide is available for use with this beta from the link at the end of this message. This documentation will be evolving over the course of the Beta and Release Candidate phases. If you encounter an error in this documentation, please report it to the documentation section of the bug tracker. If something in the documentation is unclear, please use the 3.0 support forum to seek assistance. We will be monitoring this and may make changes to clarify if necessary.
BETA Download/Documentation
- phpBB3 development section
- Quick Start Guide
- phpBB3 support forum
- phpBB3 bug tracker
- Documentation bug tracker
- Non-exhaustive phpBB 3.0 Beta1 Feature List
We wish you all happy testing,
the phpBB Teams.
In the first 24 hours since phpBB3 Beta1 has been released, there have been 8373 downloads (a download every 10 seconds) using up about 10 GiB of bandwidth, graceiously provided by 