Random Neural Firings

My current consulting gig is with for one of the largest retailers on the web, Overstock.com. The company is aggressively seeking to leverage social media and networking to improve attention and retention to their site–just like all companies that actually understand where the attention of the masses is at this particular moment in history.

I was hired to build their social media and community sites and tools (not alone, of course). In Overstock’s case, those “sites and tools” include blogs, forums, video sharing (a la YouTube), etc. I’ve had my fingers in basically all of these sites, but the big beast of late has been the forums.

Here’s the deal:

Overstock’s current forum system is built on phpBB2 and is very limited in it’s capability relative to the rest of the Overstock.com family of sites. The current project that I’m on has two primary objectives:

1. Migrate the Overstock forums to phpBB3
2. Integrate Overstock’s Unified Login system so that the forums authentication/authorization is based on enrollement in one of Overstock’s main sites (i.e. auctions, shopping, etc), rather than enrollment in Overstock’s forums.

Obviously the intent is to make the forums feel like a part of the Overstock.com family, rather than a third-party solution that has been crimped onto the corner of the Overstock sites.

So, why blog all this?

Simple: phpBB3′s code base is a freaking nightmare. So whether for my own future reference (never know when you’ll need it), or for some other poor geek that gets saddled with similar objectives, I figured I would document how I finally succeeded in making it all work. Obviously I’ll leave the specifics of Overstock’s unified login system out–that’s just ethics and good sense. But given that phpBB3 is open source (probably would be better referred to as “Obfuscated Source“) I am perfectly justified in divulging all I now know about its inner workings. Sadly, even after many epic battles, I still don’t understand much of how it all works. What’s worse, I think, is that I don’t understand why phpBB3 is built the way it is. I figure it’s for one of two reasons:

1. They have built their latest release on a horrible legacy code base with only enough modification to feel justified in calling it a new version. I could be wrong: they might have built it fresh from the ground up. If so, I’m even more disgusted by the phpBB development team, because that code is a mess. I find this hard to swallow, however, because the mere presence and pervasiveness of global variables throughout the code base tells me that the system design was lacking in foresight and flexibility, and was rather built to accomodate features that are making an unaltered journey from phpBB2 to phpBB3.
2. They have intentionally built on a hellishly cryptic architecture to keep it as proprietary as “open source” software is legally allowed to be. It’s certain that, once they’ve seen the code, developers and companies are going to think twice about building “their own” bulletin board systems by extending and modifying phpBB. The smart money would likely decide that they need to either stick with what phpBB offers (few modifications), or build their own system from scratch.

Of course, all of this could be completely unfounded. It could very well be that the code isn’t that hard to follow…once you know what to look for and where to look. But therein lies the biggest beast of all: trying to follow any logical flow through the phpBB3 code. In my exprience (and taking a page from the Simon Cowell Method of Introducing Similes), it was “quite like” tracking the movements of quantum particles at distances increasingly closer to the Planck Length. Every once in a while, with some heavy calculations and a fair amount of predictive luck, your observation might cross paths with the object you’re trying to observe; but mostly, the object just bounces seemingly instantaneously from one position to another without warning or trace.

At this point, I have to give props to the people at Zend. Were it not for Zend Studio (5.5) and their Zend Server Platform’s remote debugging capability, I’m certain I would have tossed in the towel weeks ago after determining that it was impossible to follow through the code manually. I was successful, ultimately, entirely thanks to the ability to step over and into specific parts of the code along the execution path; something that’s impossible to do in PHP without this Platform tool, as far as I know.

Let the battle begin.