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FluxBB version 2.0

FluxBB v2.0 introduces some new features that have been requested by the community for a long time. This will be the reason for an almost complete rewrite of the existing code, so that v2.0 will take the place of what v1.3 was originally planned to be.

One of the new main features will be a template system. This will allow for better separation of presentation and logic of the software. It will also give style creators the ability to specify their own templates, which, together with the styles, will create an entirely new aspect of modification: themes.

Also, v2.0 will have the extension system which was introduced in v1.3. The "old" version was getting too complicated and moved FluxBB more away from the original aim: the goal to be light-weight and fast was set back in favor of focussing on extensibility. The way markup and code were mixed in v1.3 also made it more difficult handling the markup of extensions, so that the developers decided to simplify the system for the next major release. This, together with the template system is the part of the software that we are most excited about.

There has also been a discussion going on about dropping support for PHP 4. Since FluxBB v2.0 will focus more on object-oriented design and the official support for PHP 4 has already ended, this would be a legitimate step. Especially the new object-orientation features are the major advantages of PHP 5. The official decision has not been made yet.

One of the features that would be possible to implement only with PHP 5, would be a true database layer interface, which would create a set of functions that every database layer has to implement. Thus, the supported database engines would not be hard-coded in the core anymore. This would also allow for easy addition of support for other database engines.