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.

The Theme has been deeply hacked to fit the new architecture of the underlying template code and finally it works with excellent fitting for the new sub forums and announcement module.

The final version of the website after those modifications had those list of new features:

1- Better Board layout and organization
2- Icons for categories and forums
3- Icons For Messages and description field
4- Enhanced Search engine for better and more precise results.
5- Better Organization using Sub Forums technique and forums are now organized in hierarchy-based tree.
6- More Informative bottom bar with accurate information about users and guests currently visting the website *not for the last 5 minutes as it was before*
7- new “Preferences” link you can see in the upper menu bar for your customized forum settings such as posts listing order.
8- Optimizations in the site code that has reflected on the overall website viewing and navigation performance.
9- you can now have the “unread” flag on your topics even if you signed-out and you can change this settings from your preferences panel.
10- new totally-rewritten announcement system which have multiple levels of control “Global Announcements, Announcements per forum/sub-forum”
11- more accurate Poll collection engine for more accurate results.
12- “Watch This Topic” Feature
13- “Topics I have posts in” Feature.
14- Better moderation features and complete management over the forums.
15- and you can now write the TOPIC TITLE in ARABIC without problems as you can see in this post .
15- etc… we have many many features in this enhanced version and you’ll see them yourself.

I hope you enjoy the website and feel the 18 hours work.

9,800 lines in 18 hours with average 9 lines/minute