The strange thing that caught my attention is that PunBB is a very simple PHP-powered bulletin board. Why such a big company like Facebook didn't make their own forum CMS or use a commercial one such as vBulletin, or the free and famous one phpBB, or bbPress. Why PunBB?

I went ahead to PunBB and register for an account for their forum. I tested it and here are some findings.

PunBB features

PunBB claims to have the following features:

• is fast.
• has simple layout and design.
• is easy to administrate and moderate.
• doesn't output huge, non-valid, (X)HTML pages.
• has source code you could read and understand.

What I like about PunBB

1. The forum seem to be pretty simple and fast as they claimed it to be.
2. It's light weight.
3. Active support community.
4. Used by famous companies like Facebook.
5. (due to unexpected reason, this part is missing).

What I don't like

There are something I don't like though.

1. The system redirect the URL for almost every action related to the database. That's something very strange, and ofcourse it slightly increase the lag and wait time between operations.
2. The PunBB forum, just like other forums and unlike bbPress, doesn't have friendly URL. At this time I still don't know if there are plugins that provide friendly URL feature for this. If not, this will be a major drawback for the system and might be the cause for me not using it.

What's next?

I'm considering this to be the solution for my own help forum in replacement for the help page. I hate complexity in the interface and back-end system. Something like Joomla just isn't right for me.

If you are interseted in this system, please go ahead and visit their website PunBB and test out their PunBB Forums. And of course, you should check out how face book use it on their Facebook Platform Developers Forum. And (another and) don't forget to come back here and tell me how you feel.

It's now available for download from this page: Post Teaser 2 - An Essential WordPress Plugin.

The Bug

When I click the Update Options button on the Manage Post Teaser page, I got this: "Cannot load post-teaser.php." as shown in the snapshot:

Locating the bug

It's annoying abit, but it's also easy to fix. I notice the following URL after the button is clicked:

http://binh.name/wp/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser.php&saved=true

And this is the URL before the button is clicked:

http://binh.name/wp/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser/post-teaser.php

The different here is noticable.

• The failed query is: post-teaser.php&saved=true
• The unfailed query is: post-teaser/post-teaser.php

So the correct query for saving the options should be: post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true

Debugging it

Open file "post-teaser/post-teaser.php" in the Plugin Editor (found in the Plugins page in Admin panel).

Search for the string "post-teaser.php&saved=true" in the file , and found the following lines:

• 101: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser.php&saved=true');
• 103: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser.php&saved=true');

Replace "post-teaser.php&saved=true" with "post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true" and we get:

• 101: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true');
• 103: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true');

Alternatively you could edit the plugin file locally then upload it.

A screenshot where it is located:

Problem Fixed:

Conclusion

The author of this plugin actually wrote it up to version 2.3 of WordPress. Or maybe because he just didn't mean to have the user keep the post-teaser.php file under the post-teaser folder. Either way, I hope when writing the plugin and packaging it the author should consider the end user first.

I, a web developer still didn't realise I had to extract the php file into the plugins folder instead of the whole folder which contains the php file? Most of the plugins come packaged with readme.txt, plugin-name.pot, etc. How does the user know what to do without reading pages of documentation? We should make it simple for the end users. KISS principle is appreciated.

Since this wonderful plugin has a public license I would like to continue supporting it. If you have any problem please feel free to leave a comment on this page. And... sorry I couldn't fix the translation files. So if you are using another language, please bear not having it, or modify the original file as directed by this debugging tutorial.

You can directly download Post Teaser 2 now.