The new MOD will provide an additional field to the database allowing the Administrator to leave a more helpful message as to why the board is down and when it will be back up.  As an analogy, the proprietor of your local corner shop may stick a note on the door saying “closed for delivery, back in 5 minutes” rather than just flipping the “open/closed” sign over to keep his customers better informed.

As the board will need to be disabled periodically for future modifications to be applied it makes sense to start with this one!

Update:

• 15:41 BST - Modification successfully applied to production server.  Board down for 13 minutes - longer than expected as I FTP’d one of the configuration files as Binary rather than ASCII.  Had to scratch my head to find that one!

However, some changes are made by editing the board software code directly - in phpBB parlance these changes are referred to as MODifications.  As phpBB is an open source program the source code is freely available and administrators can make changes to the code to suit their individual requirements.

Applying modifications

Generally the process I follow is:

1. FTPing (copying) the entire source code from the live site to the test environment.  This ensures that the test environment is an exactcopy of the live or production environment and that the subsequent testing will be valid.  This may sound like overkill but occasionally MODs are applied into the test environment and never make it to production - e.g. if the MOD fails testing, or if the functionality of the MOD is not quite what I intended.
2. The required software files are modified in the test environment with EditPlus Text Editor (think of a sophisticated version of the NotePad or WordPad utilities that are bundled as part of Windows accessories)
3. A copy of the board’s MySQL database is then taken for the backups and loaded into the test environment so I have some real board postings to use for my planned tests.
4. At this point I often disable the wireless network just to be sure I can’t possibly make changes to the hosted production environment by mistake (Akin, perhaps to taking the fuse out of your electrical consumer unit at home when your rewiring.  You have already switched the power off at the mains so taking the fuse out is, perhaps, unnecessary - but you do it just in case!)
5. Testing is performed in a vigorous and systematic way with any issues being documented.
6. Once a MOD has passed it’s test regime, the production version of the board is temporarily disabled (users see a try again later message if they attempt to access the board), the modified files are FTP’d back to the host and the production board re-enabled.
7. Announcements are posted on the board or here in the site news blog about the new functionality offered

Following this methodology allows me to maintain a stable board system at all times with the minimum of inconvenience to users in terms of down time.

Update: Board restored from backup and forums live at 09:54 GMT .  Total outage time 69 minutes.

Reason for restore:  configuration changes that had been tested successfully in the off-line development environment failed to execute fully on the hosted production server (due to minor incompatibilities between the two environments).   Prior to the modifications being applied the forums were taken off-line, a database backup was taken using phpMyadmin export utility from the production server and the modifications applied.  On failure, the fourm tables were dropped and re-imported from the backup, hence no posts were lost and the board brought back on-line in a stable state.

Leason learned: ensure that development environment software versions reflect those on the production server (fully and not just at the major release level).  Configuration changes “on-hold” until this is the case.

Once again, apologies for the outtage.

• Styles, templates and configuration options changes can be tested before going live on the board
• MODs can be fully evaluated and thoroughly tested before going into production
• Backups files can be restored to ensure integrity
• The user experience should be enhanced

I am intending to bring this functionality to the board soon (we use it over at Google Groups) but there are a number of considerations:

• Spam - none of us want porn attachments/uploads turning up!
• Third party MODs need to be supported (upgrade path in line with phpBB)
• phpBB 3 is currently in beta.
• MODs should really be applied in a test environment first.

The first issue will be resolved with reference to a users posting rank (i.e frequency) or by Admin assigned user privileges.  The last three by research and testing in an off-line development environment.

• User ranking enabled based on number of posts to the board
• HTML enabled within posts

Config: 

• Initial config completed
• Backup strategy implemented
• Duncan joined as user #2
• Initial forum categories and forums created
• Inaugural post by Duncan
• User polls enabled
• Enabled uploading of Avatar images into user profiles