Yesterday was my happy day because I’ve finished the upgrade process of www.cat-hackers.com as it took me 18 hours of continuous coding and 9,800 lines of code to have this done.

We were using phpBB 2.0.22 as a CMS and after a while we needed many features as the number of members and number of posts is increasing, also the topics organization issue needs headache so I decided to upgrade the website and customize the look-n-feel to fit our needs.

The process actually began with finding the correct mods I wanted to use and I gathered the mods list to be applied and started the work.

Actually I take a backup of the system every friday but this time I took a complete image of everything and setuped a local domain on my machine as cat-hackers.local.com to be used with apache and mysql for local testing.

I started the process of applying the CH Mod which took 4 hours of patching the code and after all I tried to start the system with a complete failure because I’m not using vanilla code, I’m using already patched system with much modifications of my own and external mods. So the system was not ready to accept the current installed mods after installing CH Mod, so I tried to fix things up with complete failure because of the new architecture of CH Mod.

I started with understanding the architecture of the CH mod and finally I could gather my ideas to modify the code and actually it ended up with modifying about 30% of the underlying code of phpBB and complete rewriting of the announcement module and search engine.

well I know that I might sound crazy but this solution allowed me to integrate the old mods with new features and more user setting independency and of course integration of our beloved theme.

» Read more: H4ck3rZ Website upgrade…The Challenge