Was this not working for you. In php you can specify a path or an url to grab a file, so phpurl should work. The reason this was changed is path was causing some problems on some servers with the fileopen because their doc root was already getting prepended to the front of the path.
Donate to UBBDev today to help aid in Operational, Server and Script Maintenance, and Development costs.
Please also see our parent organization VNC Web Services if you're in the need of a new UBB.threads Install or Upgrade, Site/Server Migrations, or Security and Coding Services.