Hello,

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB3 RC4 package - the "Celebrate the unkown Birthday" Edition. This is the fourth release candidate which is meant to become the Gold release if no more bugs or problems arise.

For release candidates full support is given, allowing language packs as well as modifications and styles. We only give support to those having a clean RC installation or updates from previous release candidates, previous conversions or updates from betas will not be supported here. We encourage only those running the release candidates wanting to test out the new version, it is still recommended to wait for the full release; after all this is a release candidate.
Please also note that we urge you to update - we only support the latest version. Bug reports submitted for previous releases will be closed as well as only the latest version being supported here.

RC4 has seen quite a lot of improvements, the software should be overall much more stable. Some important fixes are for example:

• [Feature] Let the user choose how to update modified files (merging, using new file or using old file) within automatic updater
• [Feature] Allow "older" updates applied with the automatic updater. This allows people using it for updating, say, from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 (with the correct package of course) and then from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2 if the latest version at this time is 3.0.2. These changes take effect beginning with RC4 or people replacing install/install_update.php manually prior doing the updates.
• [Feature] Ability to disable birthdays completely with new board features setting
• [Feature] Ability to externally set $phpbb_root_path if wrapping phpBB3 by defining constant PHPBB_ROOT_PATH
• [Change] Add version number to ACP index (Bug #13703)
• [Change] Improved utf8_clean_string with a more complete list of homographs and NFKC normalization
• [Change] Re-implemented All Yes/No/Never links in permission panels for easier changing all categories at once
• [Change] Advanced permission link now "marked" if no role is assigned and custom permissions set. With this an admin can instantly see if the object is not set at all or having custom permissions, something you only saw if advanced permissions were viewed before.
• [Fix] Enforce the max password length for automatically generated password created by the password sender (Bug #13181)
• [Fix] Correctly destroy sql cache for some query combinations (Bug #13237)
• [Fix] Allow link forums being password protected (Bug #12967)
• [Fix] Correctly hide post/reply buttons if permissions are not given (related to Bug #12809)
• [Fix] Remove orphan/wrong permission entries for non-existent forums - self-repairing permissions if conversions went "crazy"
• [Fix] Increased the number of style objects (styles, templates, themes and imagesets) possible from 127 to 65535 for MySQL (Bug #13179)
• [Fix] Correctly convert 2.0 website profile fields. (Bug #13379)
• [Fix] Correctly mark forums read if using cookie based topic tracking (Bug #13245)
• [Fix] Only show moderator log entries for forums the user is having moderation rights in (Bug #12481)
• [Fix] Fixed bug in realpath replacement letting it actually work again
• [Fix] Use global url validation for img bbcode tag (Bug #11935)
• [Fix] Added proper unicode support to style names (Bug #12165)
• [Fix] Missing localisation for an imageset no longer triggers a lot of "imageset refreshed" log messages (Bug #12027)
• [Fix] Allow manual specification of remote avatar dimensions if getimagesize is disabled (Bug #13531)
• [Fix] Send out activation email if admin activation is enabled and user activated through inactive users panel upon registration (Bug #12065)
• [Fix] Several fixes for custom profile fields on multi-lingual boards (Bugs #13763, #13527, #13525, #11515)
• [Fix] Cron now uses a locking variable to make sure it does not spawn too many webserver processes (Bug #12741)
• [Fix] Cached stylesheet now supporting gzip compression
• [Fix] Fixing session problems when using MySQL strict mode in conjunction with very long browser agent string (Bug #13827)
• [Fix] Allow moving private messages from the sentbox (Bug #13791)

Please refer to the complete changelog for the complete list of fixes since RC3:

http://www.phpbb.com/support/documents. ... &version=3

A short explanation of how to do a conversion, installation or update is included within the provided INSTALL.html file, please be sure to read it. If you want to be on the safe side we suggest still waiting for later releases before you fully convert your 2.0.x installation.

Minimum Requirements

phpBB3 has a few requirements which must be met before you are able to install and use it.

• A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System with support for PHP
• A SQL database system, one of:
  • MySQL 3.23 or above (MySQLi supported)
  • PostgreSQL 7.3+
  • SQLite 2.8.2+
  • Firebird 2.0+
  • MS SQL Server 2000 or above (directly or via ODBC)
  • Oracle
• PHP 4.3.3+ (>=4.3.3, >4.4.x, >5.x.x, >6.0-dev (compatible)) with support for the database you intend to use.
• getimagesize() function need to be enabled
• These optional presence of the following modules within PHP will provide access to additional features, but they are not required.
  • zlib Compression support
  • Remote FTP support
  • XML support
  • Imagemagick support
  • GD Support

The presence of each of these optional modules will be checked during the installation process.

Security

Security issues found should be reported to our security tracker in the usual way.

Available packages

If you experience problems with the automatic update (white screens, timeouts, etc.) we recommend using the "changed files only" or "patch" method for updating.

With this release, there are four packages available.

• Full Package
  Contains entire phpBB3 source and english language files.
• Changed Files Only
  Contains only those files changed from previous versions of phpBB3. Please note this archive contains changed files for each previous release.
• Patch Files
  Contains patch compatible patches from previous versions of phpBB3.
• Automatic Update Package
  Update package for the automatic updater, containing the changes from previous release to this release.

Select whichever package is most suitable for you.

Please ensure you read the INSTALL and README documents in docs/ before proceeding with installation, updates or conversions!.

The automatic update package does not include the file includes/utf/data/recode_cjk.php. If you use a SJIS encoding or a variant you should replace this file manually with the version included within the full package.

Download/Documentation

• phpBB Downloads
• phpBB3 development section
• phpBB3 Documentation
• phpBB3 support forum
• phpBB3 bug tracker
• phpBB3 Coding Guidelines
• phpBB3 Sourcecode Documentation

Have fun with the release,
the phpBB Team More...

RC4, eh? hmmmm....

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