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Wordle is a new word game that is the current viral sensation. Wordle is a mashup of MasterMind and word unscramble. The game combines letter position strategy and five-letter word knowledge.

The Wordle player has six chances to guess the correct five-letter word. The program will tell you which letters you’ve guessed correctly and whether the letters you’ve guessed are in the correct order. Each guess must be a valid 5-letter word.

The game’s unique premise is you can only play it once a day. This limitation prevents the game from being a black hole of time. The once-a-day time limitation for Wordle requires people to come back daily to play.

The fundamental strategy of Wordle is to cover as many letters as possible in the first couple of word choices. Your first word choices must always use five distinct letters and multiple vowels.

The Wordle requirement to use five distinct letters and multiple vowels requires looking at letter frequency in 5-letter words. Dr. Drang calculated the letter frequencies focused on 5-letter words. Based on his work, the top 20 letters used by 5-letter words are A, E, R, O, I, S, T, L, N, U, Y, C, D, H, M, P, B, G, and K.

The key is to find a series of Wordle acceptable words that cover most letters.

The one limitation of this approach is multiple letter usage. If the answer is a word like “LOOKS,” the use of a single O will not indicate the numerous use of the letter.

My Wordle word attempts are the following words: ADIEU, SNORT, and LYMPH. These words include 15 of the top 16 letters, with the one exception of the letter C.

Here are my choices for the Wordle game from Saturday, January 22.

What are your favorite words to play Wordle?

When you are developing an extension for phpBB, you will have to setup your own version control. Once an extension has been approved for the customization database, phpBB will handle the version control.

To manage the version control require changes to your composer.json file and the creation of a version xml file. The version xml file will need to be stored on a webserver that is publicly available.

Version File

The version file is an xml file with the following format:

{
"stable":
     {
     "1.0":
          {
          "current":"1.0.0",
          "download":"https:\/\/www.yoursite.com\/folder\/folder\/folder\/extension.zip",
          "announcement":"",
          "eol":null,
          "security":false
          }
     }
}

As you can tell the xml file is pretty self explanatory. The key values are the stable, current and download. This file will need to be hosted where it publicly available on the internet.

Composer.json file

The composer.json file will need to tell phpBB where to look for the version file. The following lines should be in your composer.json file, but are probably blank. The xml code needs to look like:

	"extra": {
		"display-name": "Extension Name",
		"soft-require": {
			"phpbb/phpbb": ">=3.1.0-RC2,<3.2@dev"
		},
		"version-check": {
			"host": "www.site_version_file_hosted.com",
			"directory": "/directory/structure/to/file",
			"filename": "filename.xml",
			"ssl": "true"
		}
	}

The SSL flag will need to be changed based on your sites requirement to use https or regular http.

Hope this helps.