The forum is not visualy integrated into the main site anymore to save us the work of creating a custom theme. So it will act as an independent sub site now.

While the look and feel changed a bit – the forum is now also mobile friendly – due to the software change, the general structure is the the same. As before you can format your post using Markdown syntax (we created our own MyBB plugin for that). Also all existing user accounts and login credentials should work as before. 

If you had enabled mail notifications on certain forums or topics you may need to re-subscribe again with the new forum.

Sadly the new forum uses a totally different URL structure and there is no usable way to redirect them, so sadly many internal links will break.

Please note: User accounts that have been registered for more than 3 years and have 1 or 0 posts and/or threads have been disabled and cannot posts anymore. If you are affected by this unwantedly please contact us.

Uploading attachements and avatars is disabled on purpose.

We used Vanilla Forums for a few years. We choose it back then because it was the only forum software that had an importer for the bbPress forum we once started with. We had to migrate to Vanilla Forums because bbPress – originally a standalone forum software – became a WordPress plugin and we had no use for a WordPress site obviously.

We really liked Vanilla but a few years ago a company named Higher Logic took over and now focuses on their paid hosted plans. After neglecting support for the still available open source software itself and not providing proper release updates anymore, they finally made a clean cut in December 2025.

Due to upcoming server updates which will remove PHP versions older than 8.1 which Vanilla is not compatible with, we are forced again to migrate. Since options to import an existing forum database are not that many we have chosen MyBB as the replacement as it also has an importer for Vanilla.

We hope to be back soon and hopefully most user accounts and topics will be still available.

Updates

• 2026-06-02: So far looks good and we were able to fix some issues with the importer and already moved all contents. We hope to get the forum up again around the weekend.
• 2026-06-01: Sadly the available importer tool does not work properly although first tests had been promising. We hope we manage it eventually. Since we do all this in our spare time, it likely will take some days until the forum will be available again.

Unbelievable we still exist. We may be a niche CMS by now but we still strongly believe in the importance of free, open source software and independent self hosting and not relying on any paid third party service.

We still are a small team of volunteers. The team changed over the years but the current team is generally on board for 15+ years. And we have no plans to stop even if we may not always be as fast with development as we like to!

So on to the next 20 years!

• Fix path in setup checking if system is case sensitive to avoid open_basedir restriction issues on some hosts [acrylian, fretzl|

General

• Move debug constant definitions to separate file so setup also include it. Fixes broken fresh install setup processes [acrylian, fretzl – Thanks to thomfriedel]
• Internal escaping the $ char in mysql passwords has been removed from the dbBase class. Read more info about this: https://www.zenphoto.org/news/database-password-problems/  [acrylian, fretzl, guirala]

[DONATE]

Plugins

• image_album_statistics: 
  • Add missing $sortdirection parameter to printAlbumStatistic() and printImageStatistic() since getImageStatistic() and getAlbumStatistic() already supported it. [acrylian]
  • Fix wrong parameter usage of some deprecated functions. [acrylian]

Translations

• Argentinian Spanish [guirala]
• Dutch [fretzl]
• German [acrylian]
• Italian [bic]
• Russian [kuzzzma]
• Spanish [guirala]

General

PHP fixes

• Fix some PHP 8.3/8.4 deprecation issues. [acrylian]
• Replace E_USER_ERROR usages with trigger_error() being deprecated in PHP 8.4+ with E_USER_WARNING followed by exit() respectively exitzp() [acrylian]
• Removes E_STRICT error level from internal catalogue if on PHP 8.4+ [acrylian]

EXIF handling

• Catch if native PHP EXIF extension is not available on the server for metadata reading, also gettext some EXIF debug messages properly [acrylian]
• We internally used "LensType" which actually is named "LensModel" according to EXIF specs. The db column remains unchanged for compatibility but the internal EXIF field catalogue has been updated accordingly [acrylian]
• Since the EXIF fields "LensInfo" and "LensModel" are often not stored under their names but as "undefinedTags" in image metadata we added a switch to handle those [acrylian, fretzl – Thanks to hermor and kuzzzma]

Various core changes

• gallery class: Add parameter $physical_only to methods getAllAlbums() and getAllAlbumsFromDB() to always exclude dynamic albums,
  Fix upload and move/copy to dynamic albums which in fact is not possible [acrylian, thanks to Adrian0832]
• authority class: Small improvements to db queries getting administrators or one adminstrator [acrylian] 
• Old deprecated Zenphoto_Authority and Zenphoto_Administrator classes moved to separate files for cleaner separation [acrylian]
• Revert 1.6.5 fix for "null_selection" actually fixing "incorrect" usage duplicating existing select options and causing trouble with correct select type options [acrylian, bic]
• Fix issue with too wide tag select list on the admin album edit pages [acrylian]
• Fix tag suggestions on backend being not full width [acrylian]
• Removes old jQuery resizable calls for resizable elements in favor of native CSS solution.[acrylian]
• Fix debug constant defines in the wrong place to be set via the config file as intended since 1.6. More info on that here: https://www.zenphoto.org/news/debugging [acrylian] 
• New internal constant PRE_RELEASE which enables TEST_RELEASE mode which bundles the debug mode DEBUG_ERROR,  DEBUG_IMAGE_ERR and DEBUG_404 automatically on pre-release versions. This can be overridden by disabling TEST_RELASE via the config file. [acrylian] 
• Admin overview page: Now notes using a pre-release via a warning box and links to GitHub commits for info on changes. Display errors also warns via warning box if enabled. [acrylian] 
• Remove usages of E_STRICT error level as it internally is downgraded to E_NOTICE in PHP 8 and deprecated in PHP 8.4 [acrylian]
• rsslib.php moved from the zenphoto_news plugin to /zp-core/deprecated/ and replaced with /zp-core/libs/class-rsslib.php. It was formerly used internally by the zenphoto_news and the now removed check_for_update plugin. If you did use it directly somehow you need to update your include paths. There is no fallback. [acrylian]
• gallery_statistics utility: Former inline code has been moved and reworked to a new core class adminGalleryStats. If enabled it now also incorporates download statistics. For better overview the page has been divided into subtabs now [acrylian]
• New indexes have been added on the albums database table to improve performance especially related to dynamic albums [subjunk]
• Add more intuitive option to always keep a user album even when a user is removed no matter if the album is delinked or not [acrylian]
• external_auth class has been deprecated and will be removed without replacement [acrylian]

[DONATE]

Themes

• basic, Garland, zenpage, zpMobile: Basic support for scriptless-socialsharing new profile buttons [acrylian]
• basic: The custom tinymce...

General

• Metadata:
  • Fix broken EXIF image metadata import and formatting due to the old Exifer library being removed too soon in 1.6.3 [acrylian, fretzl – Thanks to kuzzzma and bic]
  • Fix duplicate tags on metadata import and elsewhere [bic]
  • New option to choose the metadata refresh behaviour in Options > Image [acrylian]
• Fix password match in registration form [bic]
• Fix and improvements for search album breadcrumbs [bic|
• Fix broken image sorting [acrylian]
• Fix albums to be selectable on the uploads page although a user has no rights to them. This fixes class methods isMyItem() and isVisible() to work as expected for albums regarding album subrighs if checking with UPLOAD_RIGHTS or ALBUM_RIGHTS. [acrylian]
• Fix status inheritance of subalbums of albums in scheduled publishing and that prescheduled published albums sometimes were not properly published [acrylian – Thanks to kuzzzma]
• Fix type of various incremented variables regarding stricter PHP 8+ behaviour [acrylian]
• jQuery 3.7.1, jQuery Migrate 3.5.0, jQuery Ui 1.14 [acrylian]

[DONATE]

New plugins

• tinymce: Long overdue update to TinyMCE 7+ [acrylian, bic, fretzl]
  
  • This is the successor of the tinymce4 plugin which will be removed with the next version. NOTE: If you have used custom configs for tinymce4 you may have to re-create them as a number of former TinyMCE plugins are gone and some options have changed that may cause trouble in the future.
  • The number of default config files has been reduced to slilm, basic and full.

Deprecated plugins

• tinymce4: Use the new tinymce plugin as the successor

Plugin updates

• comment_form:
  • Fix address fields having double autocomplete attribute if that is enabled [acrylian]
  • Adds text and math quiz fields as privacy friendly alternative/addition to captcha for fighting SPAM [acrylian, bic]
  • Support for tinymce4 and tinymce plugins. Note: A tinymce plugin must be active to use with the comment_form [acrylian]
• contact_form: 
  • Adds text and math quiz fields as privacy friendly alternative/addition to captcha for fighting SPAM [acrylian, bic]
  • Autofill available address fields, fixed deprecated log entry due to type mismatch in PHP 8.x [bic]
• downloadlist: Fix download link error due to wrong access rights check [tobifra]
• elFinder: elFinder 2.1.64 [acrylian]
• favoritesHandler:
  • Avoid duplicate instances of the same image/album [bic]
  • Fix Users watching list in admin page [bic]
  • Convert character case of new instances to possibly existing ones, since instance options are case-insensitive [bic]
  • Prevent tag_suggest bind code from output when not needed (i.e. most of the times) [bic]
  • Fix page count and a wrong use of $this in the static function pageCount() [bic]
  • Add instance name set to head title and use the text from the relevant option [bic]
  • Rename favorites class method ad_RemoveButton() to proper printAddRemoveButton() [acrylian]
• html_meta_tags: Fix image usage on non photo images [acrylian, bic]
• OpenStreetMap:
  • Various optimisations for marker popups; option to disable default styles [kuzzzma, acrylian]
  • Leaflet 1.9.4 and leaflet-providers 1.13.0 updates [acrylian]
• PHPMailer: PHPMailer 6.9.2 [fretzl]
• print_album_menu: Prevent printing of empty ul element for subalbums of protected albums [bic]
• redirector: Fix option storing absolute server path to selected file breaking it in case migrated or otherwise changed [acrylian]
• register_user:
  • Fix form not being submitted [acrylian – Thanks to NHTEC]
  • Options moved to separate registerUserOptions class, main plugin class renamed from register_user to registerUser [acrylian]
  • Several internal global variables have been turned into static class properties. If you used a custom form you need to update it as there is no fallback or deprecation warning!
    • $_common_notify_hander => r...

Here is a basic form that submits some data:

<form id="myform" action="<?php echo html_encode(getRequestURI()); ?>" method="post" accept-charset="UTF-8">
   <?php XSRFToken('myformaction'); // use a unique name of the action ?>
   <input type="text" name="mytext" value="">
   <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

The line <?php XSRFToken('myformaction'); ?> prints an input field with the token. If you need the token itself, in a URL query for example, you can use $token = getXSRFToken('myformaction');.

On processing the form data you would also have to check that XSRFtoken using XSRFdefender('myformaction');

If the token does not match this will stop the process. If it succeeds you can afterwards fetch your $_POST or $_GET data.

Always sanitize the data before using it:

$mytext = sanitize($_POST['mytext'], 3);

If you know your value will be numeric you can also use:

$mytext = sanitize_numeric($_POST['mytext']);

If you need to output fetched and sanitized data always use html_encode().

General

• Revert using the required attribute for user account forms as it makes updating existing user accounts impossible due to having multiple user forms on one page [acrylian|
• Fix issue of undefined functions on album edit page [acrylian – Thanks to tw2003|

Plugins

• comment_form:
  • Update comment_form address fields ids and label for attributes [acrylian, kuzzzma]
  • Fix wrong check for required fields [kuzzzma]
  • Fix autocomplete attribute(s) if disabled [bic, acrylian]
• contact_form:
  • Fx duplicated invalid double quotes [kuzzzma] 
  • Fix autocomplete attribute(s) if disabled [bic, acrylian]
• rss: Fix all-comments feed for gallery items, zenpage items and bot [bic]
• zenpage: Fix some PHP 8+ variable type issues [bic, acrylian]

Translations

• Dutch [fretzl|
• German [acrylian|
• Italian [bic]
• Russian [kuzzzma]