We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.3.8 “Bertie: Beer and Summer”. This version is a maintenance release of the 3.3.x branch which introduces a deferred cache purge method and marks the PHP and INCLUDEPHP template functions as deprecated in order for them to be removed in a future release. It also resolves various issues reported in previous versions.

Deferred cache purging allows Extension developers to trigger a cache purge as part of their code that is not executed until the end of the request. Therefore, the state of data and the cache will remain consistent during the lifetime of a single request.

We have also decided to deprecate the use of the PHP and INCLUDEPHP as part of the phpBB template syntax. These are rarely used, have a high potential to cause issues or be used incorrectly, and also have not been recommended for a longer period of time. These functions have now been marked as deprecated and will no longer be available in the next feature release of phpBB, i.e. 3.4.0 or 4.0.0.

The fixes include, among others, an issue with the native search backend only returning 1 match and 1 page as result, and resolves issues with emojis in the subject line of emails and email based notifications.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs folder contained in the release package. You can find the key highlights of this release below and a list of all issues fixed on our tracker at https://tracker.phpbb.com/issues/?filter=16091

The packages can be downloaded from our downloads page.

The development team thanks everyone who contributed code to this release: lionel-rowe, rxu, battye, LukeWCS, Kailey, MichaIng, nomind60s

If you have any questions or comments, we’ll be happy to address them in the discussion topic.

– The phpBB Team