After many months of work and beta releases, the phpBB Team has announced the launch of phpBB 3.1, formally known as Ascraeus, on October 28, 2014. While the gold release is revealed on 10/28, you can download the newest beta release which was released today here. For those wanting some statistics on the development of Ascraeus, phpBB has announced the following:
Over 1K bug fixes
1.5K Improvements
11K commits
In the Ascraeus release, you'll find quite a few large improvements to phpBB on all sides. For the Administration side of the forum, modifications have been replaced with the new extensions system. With extensions, all manual code edits have been done away with as all extension installations are done within the Admin Control Panel. Additionally, all updates are applied automatically by installing the new package within the Admin Control Panel.
The Moderation side of phpBB has received quite a few improvements including Soft Delete, and improved Global Announcements. Soft Delete allows you to effectively delete(hide) posts within topics from non moderators. As far as the Global Announcements, the permission system has been improved which allows you to tie one into a specific forum. Finally, The Team page can be customised to have separate tables for each usergroup. For those who use an external modification for a contact us page, 3.1 includes a built in Contact Page to contact an Administrator.
Lastly, the community can expect an advanced notifications system which will tag members when their post is quoted. And one can not forget the staple theme prosilver which is included in the default phpBB release, which has been cleaned up to be delivered with a modern look on all avenues of viewing the forum.
If you're wanting to see the full list on what has been added to Ascraeus, check out the Launch Page here.
