Summary

The Extension Catalog currently installs and recommends extensions that are not compatible with phpBB 4. This can result in fatal PHP errors, leaving users with no viable way to recover other than restoring from backups.

Details

For example, the catalog recommends the About Us extension, version 2.0.4, a release from 2015 built for phpBB 3.1.3. This version appears because it does not define maximum version constraints for PHP or phpBB. Later releases of the extension do include maximum constraints, flagging them as incompatible with phpBB 4. Since no phpBB 4-compatible release exists in the CDB or Packagist, the catalog defaults to showing this outdated version.

As a result, the catalog currently lists many “stable” extensions that are not safe to install on phpBB 4. In practice, there should be zero stable extensions shown at this stage. This creates a high risk for users and could cause widespread breakage.

Proposed Solution

Introduce a new Composer parameter in the extra section of composer.json that explicitly marks phpBB 4-compatible extensions as eligible for the catalog. For example:

"extra": {

  "display-name": "About us",

  "soft-require": {

    "phpbb/phpbb": ">=4.0.0-a1,<4.1.0@dev"

  },

  "ext-catalog": true # Only set true if extension is phpBB4 compatible

}

* ext-catalog: true should only be set for extensions verified as phpBB 4 compatible.

• The Extension Catalog would then filter out all extensions that do not include this flag.

Without a safeguard like this, the Extension Catalog risks recommending and installing extensions that are guaranteed to break phpBB 4 installations.