World, meet phpBB 3.0

After more than 5 years of development, phpBB 3.0 was finally released today at 17:00 GMT. phpBB 2.0 is one of if not the most well known and most used open source bulletin board system out there, so there was quite some anticipation for the next major release.

To list all the new features would probably be overkill and would come close to just copy-pasting the whole changelog, so just a few highlights here:

  • Sub-forums (and pseudo-forum entries that are actually just links)
  • A completely new permission system
  • A completely new template system
  • Jabber support
  • Easily customizable (and esp. extensible) BBCode system
  • Attachments
  • UTF-8 support

For developers a new module system (and also a couple of pre-defined hooks) should be of interest (you can learn more about these in the bundled docs or in their online equivalent).

Anyway, for a completely list of changes check out the Features Comparison on phpBB.com and don't forget to join the release party in #phpbb on the freenode.net network and the official board ... and digg ;-)