You might have seen me tweet about the fact that PHPBB had submitted to the Web Application Gallery a couple of weeks back. Well, it’s official – the phpBB package has been finished, tested and accepted into the Web Application Gallery. You can see the official announcement on the Microsoft Web Platform blog. That means that you can install phpBB on Windows through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which gives you a very simple wizard to walk through.

Try phpBB on the Microsoft Web Platform today!

The WebPI will take a look at the dependencies that the project has requested and pull those in as well. In the case of phpBB, this includes PHP 5.2.13 (and higher when the WebPI supports it), SQL Server (Yes, I said SQL Server!) and more. It will configure IIS for FastCGI support and the whole nine yards.

The work to accomplish all of this awesome support was done at JumpIn Camp by Nils Aderman, Chris Smith and Henry Sudhof of the phpBB core team. I’ll be talking a lot more about JumpIn Camp over the next couple of weeks but in short, JumpIn Camp was an event that I helped organize, along with Yuriy Zaytsev, Will Coleman and Bram Veenhof in Zurich, Switzerland. There were contributors from a number of the top PHP applications in the world that attended for the opportunity to work on their own projects to support various Microsoft technologies (such as IIS, WebPI, SQL Server, SQL Azure, Silverlight…) with Microsoft technology experts available for technical support.

The SQL Server patch was developed by Microsoft in line with our interoperability efforts in the open source community. The new SQL Server for PHP 1.1 driver that was released back in October, 2009 enables phpBB with UTF-8 on SQL Server, Multiple Active Record Sets (MARS) and the ability to leverage SQL Azure. phpBB has accepted that patch now in their 3.0.7 release.

There are a couple more things that are exciting about all of this to me.

First, it only took a handful of days at JumpIn Camp to pull together the WebPI package + WinCache support for superior performance on Windows. For full disclosure there was some testing and a few minor bugs fixed since then but the lions share of the work was done at JumpIn Camp.

Second, phpBB is the first of the PHP application that can be installed through the WebPI with SQL Server support. I’m hoping that it will become the trend now that the SQL Server Driver for PHP 2.0 CTP with PDO is in CTP and people can start playing with it. I know that there are several applications that are starting testing with the new driver.

Third, it was a ton of fun to get to know the folks from phpBB and all of the folks that attended JumpIn Camp. I’ve been chatting with Nils online for about 6-9 months now but this was the first time that I had met him in person.

Wrapping up – I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more of the work that came out of the JumpIn Camp wrapping up and going public over the next handful of months. It’s going to be a fun time.