PhpBB3 BBCodes

.
You all are such nice, polite people.
It would be rude for me to unleash a profanity-laden tirade.
So I'll try to keep my trucker-self under control.

I just had to mention "bbcode" earlier.... sure enough a couple hours later I -need- one.

Why, WHY does everything with phpbb have to be like pulling teeth???

All I want is to center some text. Oh that's right, to do that with phpbb you have to FUCK AROUND and take 20m to figure out how to make your own damn button and write the freaking functionality yourself.... JUST TO CENTER SOME DAMN TEXT in a regular post!

I did get this bbcode (for centering text) to work years ago on another forum of mine but I remember it was a PITA.

So I searched here and found the announcement that bbcode isn't really a thing anymore. (???)
Found the code for making a "center the text" bbcode thing (all three parts) and of course it doesn't work.
Played with it. Still doesn't work.

Ugh, I want to shake my fist at the clouds. WHY does phpbb have to be so damn difficult for the simplest little things?!

</rant>

Now to find some work-around just to center some text in a post. (sigh)

ACP / posting / BBCode

BBCode Usage
[center]{TEXT}[/center]

HTML Replacement:
<span style="display: block; text-align: center;">{TEXT}</span>

Help Line:
[center]Text to be centred[/center]

Hello everyone

I once had a BBCode for each text alignment. I found that too silly, so I combined all text alignments into one BBCode.

Usage: Html: Tip

.
Wow! Thanks everyone for the replies!! I will give those a try. I just did the (3.3.14) to (3.3.15) upgrade. What a PITA. Next time I'm going to only change the files in their "changed files" download. That's handy. I should've done that instead and saved myself two days.

I still have this update to do, but as a complete newbie (I've only been running a phpbb3 forum for 3 months), I haven't had an update yet and the fear of not being able to get it done has kept me from doing it so far ;(

.

flumsi wrote: 06 May 2025, 08:56 I still have this update to do, but as a complete newbie (I've only been running a phpbb3 forum for 3 months), I haven't had an update yet and the fear of not being able to get it done has kept me from doing it so far ;(

I had the same apprehension. The update was announced in early April and I put it off until this week. I felt I had to do it now because I'm about to open my site to the public and if there's going to be a disaster I want it to happen BEFORE the public release so I can fix it.

Seriously though, if you have a lot of edits to your core files, check out the "changed files" download. WARNING: THAT DOWNLOAD IS HUGE. It's bigger than the whole-shebang update file. After it was done downloading I saw why. (Actually it took forever to UNZIP.) The "changed files" folder is filled with updates for EVERY previous version of phpbb to be upgraded to 3.3.15. Out of all those folders I only needed the one that said (3.3.14 to 3.3.15). And there weren't that many files inside that had been updated! I was surprised.

Overall the process went smoother than I expected. This was my first update of a board that had a lot of custom changes (by me).

Make sure you back up your db and your forum (server) files.

Make sure you MARK all the files you have changed (and want to keep those changes). I had a couple where after the update (even though I took pains to mark MY files) I was still unsure if everything was correct. Thank goodness I had a backup to look at and compare file sizes.

Follow the "update" directions EXACTLY (don't lose your extensions).

If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up.

-

A lot of pressure has just been lifted from me, knowing that there haven't been that many changes.
Knowing where to look for important things in the update packages and what to focus on is worth its weight in gold for me.
Because I don't have a test environment, no matter what I change, add, or expand, it happens in the active forum. Hence my uncertainty about the update from 3.3.1.4 to 3.3.1.5.

I have indeed implemented some (maybe a few more lol) changes in the forum. I've documented everything so far, and a database backup is mandatory. FTP is also permanently backed up.

I'll be happy to accept your offer should any problems or further questions arise beforehand.
I'm still reading through the phpbb3 documentation.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart; it has already made things a little easier for me and has given me more confidence ♥

.
Thanks for saying my info was useful! I always talk too much on the off-chance that it'll be helpful. (VINDICATED!!)

Seriously, I'm glad to help. Glad to return the favor from so many others helping me previously.

I didn't read all the docs, just EVERYTHING on the update page, like a dozen times, and backed everything up twice (inside phpbb acp and also ftp the root folder back to my laptop's hard drive). When you "back up" in the acp it's only the db. I still went to myPHPadmin and exported the entire db.

And I saved the "update" instructions to a PDF because if you notice, the update info IS CALLING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!!! (Your own site is showing you the update instructions.) I didn't want that page to get wiped out during the update and then me not knowing the next steps.

But really, it was way easier than I feared.

How much of your stuff is custom edits? That's really the only thing you have to worry about, aside from making the backups.

I was afraid my custom edits were going to be all jacked up, because I went to town editing all of 'em: colors, responsive, common, and all the html template files and half of the root php files.

Most of those files weren't even changed at all, in the update. You'll see after the update is done that a lot of files have their old dates. Remember you're only overwriting if the file is NEWER. So a lot of the files weren't even touched in the update.

There were a few minor changes to the functions file. I was able to reconcile that myself. (Just had to re-add my modal button function.)

The CSS files are so damn big. It's hard to compare those (to see what's new) so I found an online utility that will compare two css files. I think they also do the other major languages. https://www.textcompare.org/css/

I got halfway done and got impatient so I tried just re-copying my perfect versions, just to see how bad it would screw it up.

It was fine. I actually noticed no problems.

I've checked everything and everything seems to be working normally.

There I go rambling again, but do watch out for the functions.php change, if you've customized that yourself.
.

Just my two cents on the edit core files thing most of us have going

You have seen my snippets?
When posted I can always find them again if they get lost in an update.
Its damn good documentation to have if needed.