Phorum 10.0.0-alpha-1 available

# Phorum 10 — A Complete Rewrite, Built for Modern PHP

*A note on the version number: Phorum 10 is a ground-up rewrite, schema-compatible with earlier versions but otherwise entirely new code. The version number reflects that break, not a count of ten sequential releases.*

Phorum has been fully rewritten from the ground up — and yet, if you're running **Phorum 6** today, you can upgrade in place. **The database schema is unchanged and fully compatible.** Same tables, same columns, same data. What's changed is everything around it.

*(If you're still on Phorum 5.x, you'll need to upgrade to Phorum 6 first before moving to Phorum 10.)*

## A modern foundation

The old procedural, PHP4-era codebase is gone. Phorum now runs on:

- **PHP 8.3+**, with a proper class-based architecture — controllers, services, and data mappers replace the global `$PHORUM` superglobal and bare procedural functions
- **Composer** for dependency management and autoloading (PSR-4)
- **Twig 3** templates instead of Phorum's custom template syntax
- **PHPUnit**, with nearly 700 tests covering the application

Existing plugins aren't abandoned: the classic `phorum_api_hook()` plugin hook system is preserved (via a compatibility wrapper), and the BBCode module has already been ported over.

## New capabilities

- **Markdown support**, alongside BBCode — posts can use either, per-message
- **A real admin panel**, including a moderation audit log, ban management, custom fields, and user groups with per-forum permissions
- **Automatic redirects from old URLs** — legacy `read.php?1,2,3`-style links 301-redirect to the new clean URL structure, so old bookmarks and search rankings survive the migration
- **Flood control** and **edit-history diffs** (line-level, so you can see exactly what changed in an edited post)
- **A web-based installer**

## Built for search engines and social sharing

- Canonical URLs and `rel=prev`/`rel=next` pagination hints on every listing page
- OpenGraph tags on forums and threads, so links posted to Slack, Discord, or social media get proper title/description previews
- Schema.org structured data (JSON-LD) on forum and thread pages
- Smart pagination that scales to forums with tens of thousands of pages, instead of rendering every page number

## Design

- All six original themes — Emerald, Topaz, Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond, Amethyst — carried forward, rebuilt with modern CSS (custom properties, no more table-layout hacks)
- Fully responsive: table-based lists collapse into touch-friendly cards on mobile
- Accessibility built in: skip links, ARIA labels, visible focus rings, proper heading structure

## Speaks your language

16 locales ship out of the box (Arabic, Bengali, Chinese Simplified/Traditional, Dutch, French/Canadian French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese/Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu), with English as the reference translation and a fallback chain so partial translations never show blank strings.

## Security

CSRF protection is enforced on every form submission, and output is auto-escaped by Twig by default — the two most common ways old-school forum software gets exploited.

Brian - Personal Blog

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/11/2026 09:01PM by Brian Moon.