On the Laravel Daily site they've posted an interview with Bobby Bouwmann, one of the most active (and awarded) members of the Laracasts website. Laracasts is an online learning site for instruction on the use of the Laravel framework and related technologies.

In recent years, Laracasts has become a no.1 resource for learning Laravel. Also, there’s a really active discussion forum on the website, so we decided to chat with one of the most active members there. Bobby Bouwmann has almost 1000 “Best Reply” awards on the forum, which is a huge number. So what is it like to be so active on Laracasts? Let’s find out.

In the interview Bobby answers questions about:

• what drives him to participate in the forum
• what value he finds in Laracasts
• how he handles "developers" that don't bother looking for answers in documentation
• what he does when he sees the same question asked over and over

His final answer offers some advice to Jeffrey Way about the forum itself, making a suggestion of how to improve it by "keeping the forum clean".

On the SitePoint PHP Blog Jeff Smith introduces Flarum, a project that bills itself as "forums made simple" that's easy to set up and includes both the standard features you'd expect from a forum and some interesting "power" ones as well.

Flarum is a forums solution that is currently in public beta and is under active development. Today we’re going to take a look at it, get it set up in a Homestead Improved Vagrant virtual machine, and look at the configuration and the features that Flarum offers. Then, we’ll compare it to some other forums platforms to see how it stacks up at a glance.

They start with a bit of environment setup including the creation of the Homestead virtual machine. The tutorial then roughly follows the installation guide and helps you get the software installed, the web server configured and configuring the software via the Admin interface. They help you set up some of the basics, permissions, change the appearance of the site and work with tags and extensions. They get more into this last topic, introducing some of the things you can customize in the layout and links to more information on both extensions and themes. The post ends with a brief overview of some of the general features that the forum offers including it being touch friendly, "friendly" URLs and easy moderation functionality.

A while back there was an article that put a negative spin on PHP ("PHP: a fractal of bad design") and there was a huge community response to it with over 1400 comments on the post itself. Over on the DevShed forums, there's a lengthy new post that goes back over that article, piece by piece, and evaluates everything that was said.

As I've seen this article a number of times, I'd like to go through it to see what everyone has to say on the subject. Warning: This is just stupidly, ludicrously long. it takes an existing 5-page article and tears it apart nearly sentence-by-sentence.

He goes back through each of the sections - Stance, Arguments, Philosophy, etc - and includes quotes from the articles and his own impressions/thoughts about them. There's a section covering some of the individual complaints that were mentioned and things like PHP's OOP model and security.

Stefan Koopmanschap has an excellent new post to his blog about some of the ideas and contributions he's made to help the phpBB community move closer to their goal move to the Symfony framework.

At the conference it was announced that phpBB was considering moving to a Symfony basis for their upcoming version 4. Since then, an RFC was posted and given the schedule for the Libertyvasion conference organized by phpBB, they're gearing up to dive deep into Symfony. This article reflects the thoughts I've offered at the Libertyvasion Conference on the combining of powers of phpBB and Symfony.

He talks some about each community, what they're all about and how this coming together might effect each side. He does list a some of the positive side effects of this collaboration - things like more skilled developers, providing a good solid use case for the framework and easier integration of the forum into a pre-existing site. He also includes a few ways for those interested to help out with the project.

On the TutToaster site today there's a new tutorial showing you how to create an entire PHP forum completely from scratch using PHP and a MySQL backend.

The code I’ll show is exactly the same than the one you can download, except for some comments. In the original project you’ll have everything well documented (using phpDocumentor). [...] This project doesn’t follow a MVC pattern, but we’ll use classes and try to separate the different functionalities.

They walk you through the creation of the database (a "posts" table) and how to organize the file structure, configuration, making the header and footer as well as the classes to do things like database connections, validation and creating the output (view) as well as working with the posts itself.

Josh Holmes has a new post to his blog today about the inclusion of a new piece of software into Microsoft's Web Application Gallery - phpBB, the popular forum software.

Well, it’s official – the phpBB package has been finished, tested and accepted into the Web Application Gallery. You can see the official announcement on the Microsoft Web Platform blog. That means that you can install phpBB on Windows through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which gives you a very simple wizard to walk through.

With the Platform Installer, handling most of the dependencies is all done for you and installing this very popular application onto your site or local machine is just a few clicks away. This phpBB install requires that you use PHP 5.2.13 and SQL Server. This package was pulled together by a group at the JumpIn Camp that happened recently.

On the php|architect blog Keith Casey has a new post that suggests something a bit counterintuitive to what a lot of developers think about their code - less code isn't always better.

Everyone says “I could build that in an afternoon/weekend/marathon session of caffeine-fueled code-debauchery” but to actually do something well, unsurprisingly, it usually takes longer.

He gives an example of this forum script that's under 1KB of code (949 bytes or so) and has some of the basic features of any forum software out there. Keith talks about the software - the features included, the included security, how it uses quotes to its advantage and how it only uses the basic functionality of PHP to make it all work.

Keith also includes a few criticisms of the code like how it uses short tags, the lack of linebreaks, using $_REQUEST and a few more.

To be blunt, it’s not pretty and doesn’t have many features, but honestly, I fluctuate between terrified and impressed by the feat. [...] More than anything, it’s refreshing and fascinating to see what someone can do when they set clear, simple, direct priorities and focus exclusively on those.

Dougal Campbell has posed a question about the popular WordPress blogging system concerning an interesting use for it that seems to be popping up more - using it as a forum.

I know there are some efforts to integrate forums with WordPress. [...] The main problem with external forum systems (as opposed to solutions purely based on plugins and themes) is that if you want a consistent look-and-feel between your blog and your forums, you have to do a lot of work.

WordPress, endlessly themeable, can be made to look like a forum, but that's not what he's talking about here. He wants feedback from other developers out there on the approaches they're taking to get WordPress to cooperate this way. There's over thirty comments on the post now with some great feedback from all around the community - check them out!

On NETTUTS.com there's a (quite complete) tutorial posted that walks you through the creation of a forum using PHP and MySQL as a backend to store the posts.

In this tutorial, we're going to build a PHP/MySQL powered forum from scratch. This tutorial is perfect for getting used to basic PHP and database usage.

They start with the backend and move their way forward, setting up the MySQL tables - categories, replies, users and topics. They describe each of them in a bit more detail before getting into the code. They show how to create template for the site (with a little CSS) and include code to create users, authenticate them, set up their permission levels, making categories/topics and much more.

The full code for the forum application they've created can be downloaded here.

Richard Thomas has added two more quick posts in his "Solar Shorts" series spotlighting the Solar framework:

• Solar Framework Shorts - Model to Form the quick way - An example of creating an auto-generated form based on a simple user model (with the controller and view code included).
• Solar Framework Shorts - Talk with the Solar Gods - A pointer to the IRC channel and discussion forums where you can interact directly with the development team and other Solar fans.

You can find out more about the framework itself on SolarPHP.com and more community information (and a project wiki) on the SolarPHP.org website.