This was my first step outside of the realm of html and css, diving head first into the depth of PHP.

The modification was built for the vBulletin PHP Forum system, which is a premium forum system that is a competitor for the popular free phpBB. I worked with the vBulletin system the first several years as I began diving into programming. It had some great foundations in regards to a templating system and it's drive to have an admin interface to relieve the need to modify code directly. The vBulletin 3.0 version took huge steps to a "plugin" interface.

The Email Integration modification was made to allow users to receive forum posts by email, reply to those emails to post to the forum, or even send an email to a special inbox to create a new thread. At the time this was created Yahoo Groups was huge and forum systems were struggling to keep users visiting their site.

Writing this plugin took many hours beating my head against the wall to understand php string functions like preg_match and preg_replace, as well as learning how to utilizing IMAP. Overall, this was a very ambitious undertaking for someone who had no programming experience.

In retrospect, I feel that taking on such a huge project without any deadline allowed me to work through all of the problems with persistance and resilience. I tribute my pattern matching and troubleshooting skills to this project.