Everything Great is *Nixbased

So, we are well into 2008 and this is my first post of the year. I really have been staying busy so far. I have been meaning to post but as some of you may have noticed the domain needed a registration payment, the issue with that is that it’s on a business partners account and his CC info was out of date. None the less, sorry for the delay.

The bulk of my time has been spent between two projects, the one I’m going to focus on in this post is the reptile site upgrade. So, I’m an Admin on one of the biggest reptile related sites on the web. I’m the guy that takes care of the server and makes sure the hamsters whom power the site get fed (and don’t get eaten by the snakes). The site is about six years old, running on an old version of PostNuke with PNphpBB2 as the forum and PhotoPost as the gallery. I know that sounds bad enough but it was also modified by the previous Admin to the point that it almost scares me to think about the security aspect of it all. I’ve tinkered and tinkered over the past year or so to keep this beast running but I’ve always known it was all a temporary fix for the upgrade that was really needed.

About a week and a half ago I started the process of going from the out of date PostNuke/PNphpBB2/PhotoPost combo to a site built around phpBB3. To do this I would need to convert from PNphpBB2 to phpBB2 and then finally phpBB3. It isn’t a hard conversion but with over 1.5GB in database between PNphpBB2 and PostNuke I knew it would take awhile to sort out what to keep and what to delete. If you need to know how to do this it goes like this: open the database, remove any prefix that isn’t phpBB related (example: Nuke_ ) on the phpBB tables via search and replace, then use the converter in phpBB3 to convert it. One thing to note however is that to use the converter you need to upload your /modules/PNphpBB2 directory to a location which is accessible by the phpBB3 script. The passwords won’t be converted and you may have a little date issue after 1st login that can be fixed by fixing the date/time format in the DB but all and all it’s not a hard conversion just time consuming.

If you need more details then that it’s time to pickup a basic web design book.

The tricky part comes when trying to figure out what software you want to use in conjunction with phpBB3. phpBB3 has only been stable since 2007-12-13 so most of the bridges for CMS’s are in the beta stage or broken. They did have a VERY long beta test so the software is however extremely solid. Another problem that has always been common among the phpBB community is that a MOD will be started, make some good progress, and then die. My strategy was to start by finding a portal instead of a CMS, this limits complexity of future upgrades and cuts down on the amount of code (and therefore less possibility of multiple vulnerabilities).

I went through a few portals starting with canverPortal I tried a few others like Stargate Portal (KISS Portal) but ended up coming back to canver due to it’s widespread use and less issues when trying to install. The portal is actively in development and already has a nice feature set, I really can say I’m please with it.

Next I installed the Mini Knowledge Base MOD. I’m not 100% sure I’m keeping this one but it is an interesting little MOD. The problem is, it does not seem to be being actively developed.

The next step was to find a photo gallery MOD that was suitable for a rather large userbase (these users love to show off the reptiles they have). This is where I’m having issues. We run a optional paid gallery service along with our free account gallery option. In PhotoPost you can set a QUOTA on each group for space used. I want to use a phpBB3 MOD to stay with my centralized plan but their does not seem to be anything similar I have found out there in a MOD. The next option for a gallery would however be Gallery2. I have used both Gallery and Gallery2 in the past and with exception of the weird way that permissions are laid out it is a great photo album.

In the meantime I used Colorizeit! to edit the ProSilver theme (yet again staying with this theme to keep things rather simple) and found a member of the site whom is a graphic designer to do the header image based off of my color scheme from Colorizeit!.

The project has however been put on hold until the site owner decides what they are doing with the entire site. Some personal issues have came up on their end which I was not fully aware of when I started this little project but I do hope things work themselves out as finishing this project would be a nice accomplishment.

P.S. Just a little side note but for those of you updating from older releases of WordPress like the 2.2.x branch to the 2.3.x branch it is best to follow the upgrade path (being a security professional you would think I would keep everything up to date but that is a whole other post).