BuBOL

Bulletin Board Object Library

BuBOL History - the Long Version

What seems like ages ago, in the fall of 2000, I was the webmaster for a Starsiege Tribes (1!) clan/tribe that some of my college buddies and I had started. As with most gaming clans, we needed a discussion board to stay in touch and basically just socialize. We had an IRC channel too, but not every- one could idle in there as much as some of us :-)

Our site at the time was on a Windows NT host with ASP 2.0. While I was reasonably proficient with ASP at the time, I didn't have the time (nor the full understanding ;-)) to create an entire web based bulletin board myself. After some brief searching, I came across http://www.asp-dev.com and downloaded their original free forum software. It had a slightly similar look and feel to vbulletin v1 or v2 at the time, which is what most of my teammates were familiar with using.

So over the next year and a half (even after the disbanding of our clan), I customized and enhanced that simple free bulletin board package into something that became known as activeForums. activeForums is still even in use today on another site that I used to webmaster (and still do on and off). It was well beyond the original free forum software, with much of the old code ripped out and replaced, but the code and design were still a mess, and there were other ASP "classic" forum packages out there with much richer features. But of course, being the proud geek that I am, I couldn't bring myself to using a 3rd party application that I was developing myself ;-)

But then, near the end of my last semester in college, I started becoming more and more interested in PHP. I had my own domain by then with PHP running on the host, but I was still very new to the language. The thing that interested me the most about PHP was the ability to write classes, without needing to compile or install anything extra on the server (as opposed to ASP/VB or even Java). This was especially important to me, being on shared hosting all the time.

So in the spring of 2002, I started working on a straight line by line port of activeForums to PHP. After finishing one script, I threw it out realizing how messy the activeForums code was, and I figured as long as I'm starting from scratch, I might as well do it right the first time (or at least do it better :-)). Plus, this would give me a more focused development project in my spare time, since I don't really have the chance to code much at work, being a source control admin and all :-)

So, by the fall of 2002, I had mostly organized my thoughts into my new PHP bulletin board package: activePhorums. But worrying that name would be confusing and/or infringing on a few other names in the tech world (Phorum, Active Directory, ActivePerl, etc.), I renamed it XBB: eXtendible Bulletin Board, since my goal was to make the code flexible and (hopefully) easy to modify and build on.

But early on in my design, I realized, it might be a good idea to separate the core classes I was working on into their own independent library, that others could use for their own bulletin boards or even CMSs or who knows what else. First this library was called APOL - activePhorums Object Library, but after the name change for the bulletin board package itself...

BuBOL was born!

As far as the future of BuBOL goes... I'm sort of flying by the seat of my pants at the moment. BuBOL feature development is driven by the bulletin board I'm creating around BuBOL (XBB). So until XBB reaches maintenance mode (I can hear my wife sarcastically saying "Like that will ever happen" ;-)), BuBOL feature development will continue to be driven by the needs of XBB. I'm sure someone will tell me that's a terrible idea but it works for me, considering I'm the only one using BuBOL anyway ;-D

Hopefully you made it this far :-)