Climbing Olympus

Bigger! But better?

phpBB3 "Olympus" promises to be the best thing to hit the forum scene since... well, phpBB2. With a refreshed layout, new admin system and a whole host of new features, it's enough to make any community administrator to piss themselves in anticipation.

However all is not as it seems. Unless you've taken the beta versions to take a look for yourself then you're bound to have already been won over by the new charms. But look closer. The code is new. The file structure is new. Everything has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. "Good!" you may be thinking, "They've been working hard!" True. But think about it. Backwards compatibility: gone. All the mods and themes for phpBB2 will just not work. And that means that there's gonna be a whole lot of waiting until phpBB3 can start to compete against it predecessor.

It's this reason that makes phpBB3 a pain to use. And even though mods and themes for "Olympus" already exist, they're not cheap. The whole point of BB's open source-ness is so that it's FREE. Yet people are taking advantage and cashing in on the hype.

God I can't wait for this thing to come out of beta, then maybe we can FINALLY get some good stuff for this.