The Metaverse is an enhanced version of the internet, an actual visual representation of everything that happens online today and even more. Each person has his own avatar, with which he is able to interact online, walk along the Street and even own buildings.

The story of the novel concentrates around Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and world’s best sword fighter and Y.T., a fifteen year old Kourier, who try to track down the creator of the Snow Crash, a virtual drug, that is able to crash the computer and your brain system simultaneously. This drug, in it’s virtual form, is however effective only on hackers, because it transmits a crash signal in the form of a binary code to the visual canal of the recipent, which only they can read, causing irreparable consequences to their minds.

Since I don’t want to spoil your reading enjoyment, I won’t divulge into further details of the story. But I’ll add only one interesting curiosity. Thanks to the wide popularity of the book at the time of it’s release, the word avatar, which was introduced by Stephenson, is since then used as the standard definition for the visual representation of a person in the internet.

And so we strike right at the core of the issue at hand. The forum has a layout, that is optimised to work with both a joomla front-end and the phpBB2 forum itself, which is littered with php code for various modules, scripts and hacks. To sum it up, it’s not really a nice piece of code, that you can expect to work with everything you want.

The first big disappointment I was struck with, was the complete rewrite of the styling mechanisms in phpBB3. It doesn’t support php styles anymore! Just plain html! Now how on Earth am I supposed to make this design to work if I can’t use php? A little further research shows that I can’t forcefully hack the styling mechanism and bypass the style selection so easily, but I do find out that there exist special php and includephp tags with which I can insert php into my styles. Hooray! My mission is not impossible after all. But this requires additional settings which lower the safety of the whole forum setup, which I figure outweighs the inability to have all of the modules displayed on the forums. So I start with the hectic editing of about 30 files that define the appearance of the forum.

The next disappointment that was literally shoved up my face, was the complete lack of any documentation that would cover all of the special template variables that can be used in styling. How could they miss something as important as that? There did exist a complete collection, made by some enthusiast, but it was unfortunately removed some time ago. On the bright side, I found a collection of template variables that are used for private messaging, which are located on easytutorials.org:

S_NEW_PM. This flag is set when user has a new private message. It is intended to be used for one time notification only, so once user changes page it disappears. Value is ether “1″ or “0″.

S_USER_NEW_PRIVMSG. This variable shows number of new private messages. Unlike S_NEW_PM it always shows number of new messages, not once.

S_USER_UNREAD_PRIVMSG. This variable shows number of unread private messages. Private messages are treated as unread if they are unread, but not new to current session.

PRIVATE_MESSAGE_INFO_UNREAD. This is a string that shows “X unread message(s)” (lang variables UNREAD_PM or UNREAD_PMS). It is empty if there are no unread messages.

PRIVATE_MESSAGE_INFO: This is a string that shows private messages status. If there are no new messages it shows “0 new messages” (lang variable NO_NEW_PM). If there are new private messages it shows “X new message(s)” (lang variables NEW_PM or NEW_PMS)

U_POPUP_PM / UA_POPUP_PM: url of private message notification pop-up. It is used in javascript that shows new pm notification. Difference between U_ and UA_ versions is &: in U_ its &, in UA_ its &

U_PRIVATEMSGS: url to private messages ucp module.

U_RETURN_INBOX / UA_RETURN_INBOX: urls to inbox in usercp pm module. Difference between U_ and UA_ versions is & in url: for for U_ its &amp, for UA_ its &

S_DISPLAY_PM: set if private messages should be displayed.

S_USER_PM_POPUP: set if pm pop-up should be displayed.

But all this didn’t solve the problems. The most ironic part of all of this is that the php and includephp tags don’t seem to work correctly all the time. Or maybe they execute the included code just partially. And that’s a big problem, because I still can’t figure how to define global variables into my template. I really don’t want to resort to manually defining them for each snippet of the code that needs them. This just sucks.

But, there are some positive aspects as-well. The transition from the phpBB2 to phpBB3 seems to work very smoothly, if we exclude the specific styling problems. The database conversion works fine, and the admin and moderation control panels are more intuitive and helpful than the old ones.