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جمعرات 2 مارچ 2006Thursday, March 02, 2006

Urdu phpBB

In case you were wondering where I was, among other things I was doing this.

As Nabeel mentioned before, we have been working on releasing a public version of Urdu phpBB.

PhpBB, for those you do not know, is described on its website thus:

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.

phpBB also has internationalization and localization support. Hence, it has been translated into a large number of languages.

Adding Urdu support to phpBB is a lot more than simply adding an Urdu language pack to it. Some changes to the phpBB core are needed to make it work properly as a Unicode Urdu forum. Further, several changes are required in the templates for properly displaying Urdu text. The integration of Urdu WebPad makes it possible to edit Urdu text without the need of installing Urdu language support or keyboard even on windows 98 systems. Therefore we have decided to release Urdu phpbb as a pre-modded package. Later, we also plan to package the Urdu language and image files separately for those running multilingual phbBB boards. For those wanting to turn their exiting phpBB forums into Urdu forum, we will release a MOD that will detail the steps needed to perform this conversion.

The version (0.5b2) of Urdu phpBB (based on phpBB version 2.0.19) we are releasing is beta quality software. Therefore, we need beta testers to help us debug it.

Most important of all, we need people who plan to install Urdu phpBB and start a forum. It will be good if they cover a variety of operating systems, database software and PHP versions.

We have also set up a test installation where you can register and help us find bugs. We also need some of those users to take the responsibility for testing moderator and admin functions.

You can download Urdu phpBB here. Information about the package, including requirements and installation instructions are here.

If you find a bug in Urdu phpBB or want to request a new/improved feature, please open a ticket. Please do check the existing tickets before opening a new one to make sure that someone hasn’t reported the same issue before.

If you have any question about Urdu phpBB or you need any help with it, please visit the Mehfil forum for Urdu phpBB support.

Posted by Zack at March 2, 2006 1:46 PM in Internet , Urdu

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Comments

What is the current status of this urdu version?

Posted by: Web Designer (4 comments) at November 10, 2006 2:03 PM

Web Designer: It is working well and is being constantly updated. Several Urdu forums are using it.

Posted by: Zack (1768 comments) at November 17, 2006 5:10 PM | PGP Sig

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