Interview by: Allen Ayres
Interviewee: Rick "Scream" Baker - UBBThreads Developer

UBBDev: Recently we caught up with Rick in between coding v5.5 and v6 with a bowling ball in one hand, golf clubs in the other, and php code on his mind. Rick gives us a little history behind the madness that is his personal obsession when not relaxing with his family or working his day job.

UBBDev: Welcome Rick Name your favorite moment in the development history of threads...

Rick: That would have to be when I decided to go commercial and not everyone jumped ship. That was a real turning point. I knew the software was decent, but was it good enough to survive in a commercial environment. Still have a copy of the very first order I received

UBBDev: Very cool, it would seem you have put a great deal of effort into the development. What are your central goals for developing UBBThreads now?

Rick: Not particularly in any order, that would be: Ease of use, stability, speed and feature-set. A big focus right now is optimizing all of the queries. As I'm working through all of the scripts for 6.0 I'm examining the queries and trying to cut down wherever possible. Here are a few examples:

First, on a typical search page with 25 results it normally did an average of 28 database queries to generate the page. This has been reduced to 4.

Threaded mode is another big one. If you had a thread with say 30 replies, this would end up generating about 80 database queries to create the page. This has been reduced to about 16.

Same with postlist in expanded mode. This one could really add up. Before the changes a typical page might generate 160 queries afterwards this was dropped to 29.

UBBDev: Major improvements <img src="eek.gif" border="0" alt="" /> Are there any other sneak-peeks you can give us into the future of threads? What should users be most excited about?

Rick: To answer both of those. Templates. Templates can be a pain for several reasons. First you might end up having a lot of templates to generate one page due to code loops and things of that nature. Second they can slow things down a bit because normally you have to loop through the template and run a regular expression on it to replace all of the variables.

I think I've come up with a system that I think everyone will enjoy working with and will be speedy as well. First, the number of templates required for a page is fairly minimal. You've got a header and navigation template first, then the actual page template and then the footer template. Secondly there are no regular expressions used. It's a normal PHP file that is included but when you edit it through the admin editor it's just HTML. The few PHP tags that are used are commented with HTML style comments so they won't interfere when editing the template in an HTML editor. It's a bit hard to explain but once everyone sees it I think they will be pleased.

Oh, and all HTML in the front end will be XHTML 1.0 compliant Thank you for your time and for letting us get to know a little more of the "man behind the code".

Rick: Cheers, Rick