PhpBB4/Use Cases

These are use cases phpBB4 should be able to handle.

OpenID, LDAP and local registrations
Users should be able to use their OpenID, login with their ldap account or choose to register locally. Or any combination thereof.

OpenID & external profile source
Users should be able to login using OpenID, their profile information shall be taken from an external source (e.g. a Joomla! installation). The profile needs to stay up to date. Changes should either propogate to the external system or not be allowed.

Google Wave integration
Users should be able to login using the Wave Federation Protocol (Open source protocol) with any wave account from any wave server. Threads that are contributed to could be treated as "waves" in which the user's Wave software would track the participation and thread updates without users ever needing to login to the variety of phpbb4 boards they are registered on.

Privacy through integration could mean privatizing a user's wave account from publication on the board in user settings, and perhaps allowing all user's to have a unique, identifying "board alias", aka the username.

Unification and Expandability Related
The search system should be designed to support more than just the posts on the forum. When a modification adds new areas to the website, such as a blog or database, they should be able to use the phpBB indexer to index the data and then have the option to handle parsing the information in their own method too (so, for example, if we were to add contribution items to the search indexer from the customisation database, we could format the output for that item as we wished inline with all of the other found items). There was a discussion about this at Area51. 

Unified reporting system to allow things other than just posts or PMs to be reported (such as profiles, or things within other modifications).

Flexible attachments system to allow modifications and add-ons to use it instead of hacking together a separate system.

Other systems as well should be as flexible as possible and designed so that other systems can use it without having to hack it up.

Mobile browser support
The session handler should be able to detect a mobile session and have a method available to check this status. There should be a possibility to override this and display the full board through a link. An alternate low-res style should be packed, containing only crucial information and content.

All interfaces would be made simpler and unnecessary features would not be shown. The use case and common intentions of mobile browser users should be taken into account and less important features do not have to be necessarily available.