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Interview with James Atkinson, creator of phpBB
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)
Posted by: OTS Staff
<b><font color="#FFFFCC">EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JAMES ATKINSON</font></b>
<i>Creator and Lead Developer of phpBB
<font size="1">Conducted on June 9, 2001</font></i>
OTS: Tell us your background. Who are you and what do you do?
James Atkinson: I'm 23 years old, live in British Columbia, Canada, I graduated college about a year and a half ago (a dinky little community college in southern Alberta that has a pretty good technology program) and have been working as a full time PHP developer ever since. I started out working for a company in Pheonix Arizona via the internet doing internal development to assist the team organize work. After that I moved on to work for a company here in Vancouver. Since then I've been working on a large PHP project for a German ship brokering company. But enough about me... 
OTS: Tell us a little history of phpBB, like what made you decide to create it and what factors led to the creation of this forum script?
JA: The main motivations for me creating this script were two-fold. First, I wanted a challenge. Everything I had done up until then I had managed to hammer out pretty quick without much of a challenge, I felt creating a full-featured forum would be a good challenge. The second reason was because I didn't see a good, Free, discussion board system.
I started phpBB during the evening of June 17, 2000. I worked for about 5 hours that night and by the end I had a system where someone could view forums/categories, post topics, replies, and do edits. Over the next couple weeks I kept poking at the code. Introduced registration, some admin functions, started on a BBCode system, and various other features. On July 2, 2000 I announced phpBB for the first time ever over at DevShed.com's forums. Despite the fact I only got 2 or 3 replies to the topic I posted there I got lots of interest in phpBB. Before long my poor little server was flooded with users wanting to take a look, at that point I moved phpBB onto the Sourceforge.net servers and really opened the development up to the community. It was at this point that the first 2 developers joined the team. John Abela and Nathan Codding. Nate came in and created the private messaging system, session handling and login code, and rewrote the BBCode code and made do way more then I had ever wanted it to do . John did lots of work on the admin and polished lots of code. All our current features were implemented by version 1.2 since then the rest of the work has been doing core improvements and discussing how phpBB can be the fastest, most efficient board on the market.
OTS: What do you think makes phpBB better than the competition?
JA: Our philosophy. A lot of our competitors (I count the other free boards as competitors, I'm not really trying to compete with vBulletin or UBB at this point) are driven to load feature after feature onto their systems. I've always taken the approach that having a really solid core system is better then a pile of features on an unstable core. phpBB v1.4 is very fast and VERY stable, its only limiting factor is MySQL (Crappy table level locking and other nasties)...
OTS: How hard is it to develop a script like this?
JA: That's kind of a hard question to answer... The actual development is pretty easy, if you're a good programmer. However, meeting the demands of the community can be much harder. You can never statisfy everyone all of the time so you have to weigh all the options that your community presents to you and try and figure out which ones they would be most happy with, and which things can be implemented without adversely effecting the system you've designed. Overall the hardest part about the project is the people, not the code (I love the people though, couldn't do it without them!)
OTS: What do you think about the other forum scripts that are available out there? Do you sometimes wish you had a feature on your forum that is visible on theirs?
JA: Overall most of the other forums out there, that are in active development, are really quite good. XMB, OpenBB, YaBB, and tForum are probably my main competitors (though YaBB dosan't really count since its Perl ). All of them have a great feature set and seem to be pretty good at handing loads. However, none of them have really been tested under heavy load (200,000 posts, 400 concurrent users etc) so I can say for sure how they handle that. I'm pretty confident that phpBB can take that kind of abuse and stay standing. I can't say I've ever looked and another forum and said 'Damn, I wish phpBB had that feature'. As I said before, its more about how stable the core system is then the number of pretty features you've got piled on top of it.
OTS: What do you think of phpBB's script-hacking community. Do they significantly help you improve your script?
JA: To tell you the truth I haven't had a lot of contact with them. John Abela and Frank Fenigol currently handle the hacking community (http://hacks.phpbb.com). Overall I think they contribute alot to the phpBB community but there are only a couple hack that we've seen that we are going to incorporate into the next incarnation of phpBB.
OTS: Will you be sticking with the current programming architecture of your forum script, or have you got something big planned for it? If so, how about giving us a hint?
JA: Well, we're currently developing phpBB v2.0. I think the biggest change in architecture is the authorization system. In v1.4 there are 2 types of forums, public and private. The private forums have an access control list and that's it. In v2.0 Paul S. Owen, one of our newest developers, has created what I think is the finest level of control you can have over a forum. You can control any aspect of posting or viewing a single forum. You can limit posting new topics to just the moderator and replies just to a select list of people, or you can only show the forum on the index page to the moderators or just to registered users. Any possible restrictions that the admin might want to put on a forum can be done with this new auth system. I think its whats really going to set phpBB v2.0 apart of all other forums out there.
OTS: What part of phpBB would you have re-done or improved if you had the chance to do it all over again? Are you planning any further enhancements and/or improvements for the current version of phpBB?
JA: Well, as I said phpBB v2.0 is currently in development. Its a total rewrite of the entire system. None of us were ever quite satisfied with the private messaging system or the user authorization system. phpBB v2.0 has lots of new stuff. Mainly new, modular, session code, full HTML templating, the new auth system (I really like it, can you tell?), and an admin section that will allow drop in componats to be added to the admin experiance just by putting a proporly created PHP file into the admin directory. Overall phpBB v2.0 is going to be a whole new, and far better, system
OTS: What do you do in your spare time, if you have any?
JA: phpBB takes up most of my spare time. I work eight (or more) hours a day and only really get to work on phpBB during the weekends and evenings. Aside for that I try and get out to the beach every once and a while in the summer, and am going to take up skiing next winter
OTS: If you were asked to describe your forum script in one sentence, what would it be?
JA: Fast, Free, Fun
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Many thanks to James Atkinson and the phpBB Group for this interview.
Visit phpBB.Com for more information on their great forum script.
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