Customizing phpBB3 the Smart Way: Feature-Driven Configuration

Let’s assume you have installed phpBB3 to run forums on the web-project you are working on. The forum system was re-skinned and your project manager, seems, is pretty happy for the first. But later he requests some changes, e.g. to prevent users from sending emails to each other within the board. This one is easy; you can disable it globally via ACP. However, the project manager wants only registered users not be able sending emails, when administrators and global moderators are still able to do it. Again, it is not a problem, because phpBB3 provides permissions roles which can be assigned to user groups. So, you go to ACP and create and a new role, e.g. ProjectX Registered User Features, based on existing one (All Features). Now you can set false ‘Can send e-mails’ option of Misc tab in User permissions panel and apply this role for all the registered users. Everything is fine so far, but only until the project manager requests something like ‘user search form in UCP has to be removed for unprivileged users’. You cannot find this feature in role options. We need custom option for user roles.