Links Opening New Windows For PHBB

Compared to phpBB3, links in phpBB2 had a slightly different behavior: When you clicked them, they opened a new window with the requested page. This was changed in phpBB3 for a couple of reasons, but one of the most important ones was the goal to achieve XHTML 1.0 Strict-validation for the whole board.

If you still want to get the same behaviour on your new phpBB3 board, there are a couple of small modifications have you to make, which this guide should hopefully explain in enough detail.

Modifying auto-detected links

First of all, make auto-detected links (those that you didn’t wrap with the url-BBCode) open new windows when getting clicked. Therefor open the includes/functions_content.php and look for following line (which should be around line 592):

$html = “$whitespace<!– $tag –><a$class href=\”$url\”>$text</a><!– $tag –>$append”;

And replace it with following line:

if ($type == MAGIC_URL_EMAIL)
    {
        $html    = “$whitespace<!– $tag –><a$class href=\”$url\”>$text</a><!– $tag –>$append”;
    }
    else
    {
        $html    = “$whitespace<!– $tag –><a$class href=\”$url\” onclick=\”window.open(this.href);return false;\”>$text</a><!– $tag –>$append”;
    }

BBCode URLs

Next open the bbcode.html of your style (if you’re using prosilver, this would be the styles/prosilver/template/bbcode.html file) and look for following line:

<!– BEGIN url –><a href=”{URL}”>{DESCRIPTION}</a><!– END url –>

Now replace it with this line:

<!– BEGIN url –><a href=”{URL}” onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;”>{DESCRIPTION}</a><!– END url –>

Help phpBB read the output again

Last but not least, you should also do the following change which will allow the created HTML output to be parsed again by phpBB: Open the includes/functions.php and replace this segment which you should find around line 2740…

          case ‘bbcode_htm’:
             return array(
                ‘#<!\-\- e \-\-><a href=”mailto:(.*?)”>.*?</a><!\-\- e \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- l \-\-><a (?:class=”[\w-]+” )?href=”(.*?)(?:(&|\?)sid=[0-9a-f]{32})?”>.*?</a><!\-\- l \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- ([mw]) \-\-><a (?:class=”[\w-]+” )?href=”(.*?)”>.*?</a><!\-\- \1 \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- s(.*?) \-\-><img src=”\{SMILIES_PATH\}\/.*? \/><!\-\- s\1 \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- .*? \-\->#s’,
                ‘#<.*?>#s’,
             );

… with this one:

          case ‘bbcode_htm’:
             return array(
                ‘#<!\-\- e \-\-><a href=”mailto:(.*?)”>.*?</a><!\-\- e \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- l \-\-><a (?:class=”[\w-]+” )?href=”(.*?)(?:(&|\?)sid=[0-9a-f]{32})?” onclick=”window\.open$this\.href$;return false;”>.*?</a><!\-\- l \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- ([mw]) \-\-><a (?:class=”[\w-]+” )?href=”(.*?)” onclick=”window\.open$this\.href$;return false;”>.*?</a><!\-\- \1 \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- s(.*?) \-\-><img src=”\{SMILIES_PATH\}\/.*? \/><!\-\- s\1 \-\->#’,
                ‘#<!\-\- .*? \-\->#s’,
                ‘#<.*?>#s’,
             );

And since you’ve updated also a template file, don’t forget to also purge your board’s cache through the respective button on the frontpage of your board’s admin panel.

Note: The change will not affect existing posts, you must edit them so they can be reprocessed.