DEV Community: littlephone

Labfroum is switching to Medoo from PDO Connection

littlephone — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 02:34:13 +0000

labstry-opensource / labforum

A lightweight, open source PHP based forum engin. This is a mirror. Checkout https://gitlab.com/labstry/labstry_forum

😽 Let's become a CAT 😽

Starting from Labforum 3.1, we are switching to Medoo.

Being based on PDO for about 3 years, we are now moving on to switch to Medoo, a cross DB solution for PHP. That means the code underlying Labforum, currently only works on MySQL or mariaDB, is about to receive cross db platform support.
Starting from version 3.1, you can use Labforum on a SQL Server db, or an Oracle DB. All up to you.

Introducing additional paging system
Switching to Medoo library means cross platform limit is handled. We will add pagination the program. You can expect a better paging system used in frontend.

What it means to you
Since Medoo is an additional library, you custom code will still works on MySQL database installation if it involves custom database queries.
However, we suggest you to move on using Medoo to query db as it will not work for installation with other DBs.

Transitional Period
Starting from 3.0.5 , we are transitioning to Medoo in our core code.
You will see two versions of connection at the same time. $connection variable is reserved for Medoo, $pdoconnection is the variable we are currently used for PDO DB connection. If you use global $connection variable, you'll receive a Medoo object. Use Medoo->pdo to get back PDO object.
However, we don't recommend using PDO as it broke the compatibility for different DBs.

I am the developer behind labforum, a PHP forum engine.

littlephone — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 13:41:22 +0000

I know that it is a bit late and I can't classified myself into a newbee but still I would like to tell my story. Let me introduce you to the labforum, the latest, lightest forum engine ever written on PHP. This was my first ever open-sourced PHP project that started my career of programming.
It's first used as a community forum in https://labstry.com, now includes an installer, and opens to the public for installing on their servers. 😝

My repo

labstry-opensource / labforum

A lightweight, open source PHP based forum engin. This is a mirror. Checkout https://gitlab.com/labstry/labstry_forum

Labforum 3.0 Documentation

Labforum is the core part that Labstry Forum is based on. It is a forum program that is written in php for personal interactive webpages.

Learn more about Labstry Forum here

No excess framework used

We used a simplicity first approach when building the forum. No excess framework is used so that the page loading speed is guaranteed.

Customisable with css, scss

Theme the forum or style easily with css or scss.

Installing Labforum

Before installing, please prepare the following:

MySQL database username and password. (Please provide your administrator or root username and password for first time initialisation)
Database domain
Database name (Provide desired name for your forum instance)

Load page http://127.0.0.1.xip.io/install-labforum.php to start installing.

Administrator Panel

Load http://127.0.0.1.xip.io/admin/index.php to enter the administrator panel. You need special previleges to enter the admin panel. Use the account you registered yourself with from the installer

View on GitHub

Why I started/revamped my project?

I have used many existing forum engine and I saw lots of forums is not quite user-friendly. You can't customise your layout because the data given are fixed and tied to the system core such as the layout and the pages, which means that you are unable to design your layout.

Besides, many existing forums in the market didn't have a WYSIWYG interface for thread composing.

I was in the uni and I saw a tutorial online showing people how to create a forum from scratch. Then I followed that tutorial for interest, as an extra-curriculum activity that helps me to learn things that the lecturer didn't teach. Then I came up with an idea, that is: instead of using an existing software to roll out my own community, I thought of using the existing code that I used in my tutorial lesson, change that a little bit, and make the code more useful.

Then I did what I thought, in which I found myself into the programming world. As time passes, I am getting more and more active into the development of the labforum.

Features

Frontend backend separation
The software uses json to send all the thread data. The advantages is that users have no restrictions on their design of the layout. Whether you want to deploy a simple page as the layout or a dynamic one, all up to you.

WYSIWYG Editor (Quill.js) included as default ✎
You can use the pre-included WYSIWYG editor available. You can also roll your own post editor page with your own editor.

Loads faster
Thanks to the technology of ajax, all pages are loaded asynchronously with data.

What will be coming in the next revamp

We will include pagination by introducing LIMITED queries inside mysql.
We will migrate to Medoo query framework so that it is compatible with other databases like mssql or oracle db.

What we currently need

We need new members to participate in the project. Please help us to spread the words. ☺️

Thanks for your time. Hope that you can support my project. 🤕
Time to get back to my work now

Replace or reduce heavy javascript frameworks

littlephone — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 04:07:52 +0000

Being worked with Vue.js in recent years, I was really satisfied with the speed and performance that it brings to my programming jobs. However, recently I came up with an opinion that it brings more cons than pros by introducing frameworks like this. To be simple, it causes the page to load more heavy libraries than before.

Using frameworks is an irreversible trend as it brings the advantage of easier programming. Using modern frameworks like Vue.js or react js just increased productivity by implementing functions that is more frequently used or introducing concepts like components, and it reduced the time that programmers have to use to search for a relevant function.

However, it is a chain that makes you load many more unnecessary libraries that you don't need.

Taking Vue.js as example, when you want to use the components, you might start by loading Vue itself, then if you find yourself hating the node.js thing, you will start by finding libraries like VueHttpLoader to load components. But that just increased libraries your site has to load everytime when visitors are visiting the page, causing performance degration.

You might say, at least you still need to load jQuery or other essential libraries. Sure we aren't having the debate here for 'librariless' or vanilla javascript where programmer use zero libraries, although at times this might be the best approach. However, I think programmers need to reduce their library stacks as possible in order to make webpages load faster. Don't rely only on modern browser technologies as there are times that user is in a relatively slow internet connection.

Introducing Labforum 3.0.5 (Unstable)

littlephone — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:20:32 +0000

Introduction

After we have open-sourced our source code in Labforum 3.0 using LGPLv2, we are now taking a bigger step forward in Labforum 3.0.5 and Labforum 3.1. These updates includes fixes on regressions of threads and pages, as well as migrating API classes to use the classes in src/, which was introduced in the pre-alpha stages on 3.0 .

After we did a complete revamp of the forum, the software isn’t stable enough for normal day usage. If you need a stable-er version, please wait until we announces it.

We are asking for help because we are a small team and have to switch between different projects. Please join us in GitLab.

Our Repo

https://www.gitlab.com/labstry/labstry_forum

Changelog

General Bug and Regression Fixes
In Labforum 3.0.5, we are now deprecating classes within api. This deprecation was due to the structural change for API calling, where api will use standardised Classes together with the frontend. Warnings will be prompted to suggest users to migrate to the classes based on src/ folder.

A partially revamped Admin Panel
We revamped the admin panel to make it look a little nicer. We did that by changing the colours used on the header. We adopted a more vibrant color to makes it look comfortable, we increased the text size of the titles to make it more visible to users.

Adopting Bootstrap 5
As the date drawing closer to the release of BS 5, we are taking early steps to migrate to BS 5 to allow us to adapt the changes made in this version update. We are now using new classes name to replace the old, deprecated ones.

DEV Community: littlephone

Labfroum is switching to Medoo from PDO Connection

labstry-opensource / labforum

A lightweight, open source PHP based forum engin. This is a mirror. Checkout https://gitlab.com/labstry/labstry_forum

😽﻿ Let's become a CAT ﻿😽﻿

I am the developer behind labforum, a PHP forum engine.

My repo

labstry-opensource / labforum

A lightweight, open source PHP based forum engin. This is a mirror. Checkout https://gitlab.com/labstry/labstry_forum

Labforum 3.0 Documentation

No excess framework used

Customisable with css, scss

Installing Labforum

Administrator Panel

Why I started/revamped my project?

Features

What will be coming in the next revamp

What we currently need

Replace or reduce heavy javascript frameworks

Introducing Labforum 3.0.5 (Unstable)

Introduction

Our Repo

Changelog

😽 Let's become a CAT 😽