phpBB Weekly

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On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and John Wells (Jhong)

We’re joined on this episode by John Wells (Jhong), the guy behind the WP-United project, an integration between WordPress and phpBB3. He joins us all the way from Shanghai, China, where it is after midnight during this episode. And, courtesy of the Chinese government, we have a little bit of audio quality fun along the way, along with an unexpected encounter with a cheesy arrangement of “Ode to Joy.”

But I digress. John tells us all about WP-United, including why he started it, some of its history, some of its very interesting features (such as the ability to “blend” WordPress and phpBB elements on the same page), and how an administrator would get it to work. We also discuss a little bit about programming the integration for phpBB2 vs. phpBB3, and compare it to phpBB3’s Hook System which makes other integrations like the RokBridge-Joomla! integration possible.

Then, Micheal takes the opportunity to go over the phpBB Support Toolkit, which just had its first RC release this week. This is sure to be a very powerful and useful tool once it goes final, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it on this show.

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll was “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” There were 35 votes cast, shattering our previous record of 20. Here’s the results:
10 votes (29%) for an “Automatic idiot user filter.”
6 votes (17%) for a “Rocket launcher (David’s suggestion).”
6 votes (17%) for “A front that doesn’t fall off.”
5 votes (14%) for a “Coffee maker. (Take that, Starbucks!)”
3 votes (9%) for “The kitchen sink.”
3 votes (9%) for “Insurance from Paul’s continuous slapping.”
And 2 other votes (6%): “no new features!” and “Nicole Scherzinger”.

Our new poll is “What would be the most likely impact of enabling Quick Reply on your board?” Vote in this poll in the sidebar on the right; this poll will be open until Saturday, July 11.

The MOD of the Week is User Notes/Warnings in Viewtopic by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is AcidTech Tiger by CyberAlien.

Remember that there will not be a live episode next weekend due to the 4th of July holiday (in the United States); our next live episode will be on July 11th.

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On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

How does one follow up the episode that we had last week, when we covered the surge of changes coming in 3.0.6? Well, for one thing, we did have the chance to hear the opinion of Mr. “We Know Where You Live, We’re Coming Now” himself, as we get Ash (NeoThermic) to give his opinion of the new quick reply coming in 3.0.6. Oh, and we did take some time to acknowledge the efforts of the Development Team to bring on new Junior Developers — combined with the full Development Team, we’re looking at the most developers phpBB has ever had at one time. Not too shabby, eh?

However, we decided to focus this show on a phpBB tutorial that we’ve never actually covered before, if you can believe that such a thing exists. We’re talking about Converting to phpBB. If you’ve got one of the Available Convertors, you can bring many other bulletin board programs (or in some cases, phpBB2 with certain MODs installed) up to phpBB3. In addition to going through how to convert a board over to phpBB3 (which is really easy, thanks to phpBB’s Unified Convertor Framework), we also overview what’s actually involved in building and maintaining a phpBB convertor.

Meanwhile, Micheal sympathizes with a Gumblar victim, and Douglas shares some new developments regarding OSCONvasion 2009. phpBB Weekly will (likely) be streaming live from OSCONvasion, on Thursday 7/23, so if you can’t join us in person, hopefully you can join in live!

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question, “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” continues through Saturday 6/27, so be sure to vote on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is AJAX Quick Edit by mac1706, and the Style of the Week is ClanzDarkness3 by Griffin.

And, credits for the closing bonus goes to a Muppet interpretation of “Ode to Joy”.

Be sure to join us next week, when we will be joined by guest John Wells (Jhong) of the WP-United project! Share your questions for him on our forum.

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On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s just like old times on this episode of phpBB Weekly! Douglas and David are solo-hosting the show, David makes up a fake name for himself at the start of the show, and the episode lasts forever.

But on the contrary side of things, the main focus of this episode is an unprecedented announcement from the Development Team describing new features coming in phpBB 3.0.6, a “maintenance/bugfix release,” for Pete’s sake! We thoroughly analyze each of the announced new features and discuss what they’ll do, why they will be added, and what the effects will be for MOD authors in particular.

The new features include a new CAPTCHA plugins architecture, ATOM (RSS) feeds, support for four new cache/ACM plugins (and a no-cache option), exempting group leader permissions for groups, group management changes for the post queue and other permissions, separation/clarification of the Reply/Reply to All functions for private messages, pagination for smilies and icons, the ability to search logs, and other tiny features and bugfixes. And quick reply. Yes, Q U I C K R E P L Y, as Meik posted, representing a significant about-face from the phpBB teams which have traditionally been firmly against the inclusion of a quick reply feature since who knows when, and Douglas and David spend a bit of time talking about the significance of this quick reply concession and why we think it’s a good thing.

Then, Douglas formally announces the full details of the OSCONvasion 2009 meetup he is organizing, happening in San Jose, California in late-July. If you’re going to be in the Bay Area or are planning to come to OSCON, we hope you can make it!

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll question was “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” The top response was Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) with a whopping 13 votes (65%), followed by “The guy who made the front fall off” with 5 votes (25%), in closing up with Steve Wozniak and “The father of the internet” each receiving 1 vote (5%). President Barack Obama received 0 votes.
Our next phpBB Weekly Poll will be “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” The poll runs until Saturday, June 27th; vote in the right-hand sidebar on our site.

No MOD or Style of the Week this week. The episode’s closing music is Do You Know the Way to San Jose – Dionne Warwick, and the quick reply clip comes from the Discussion Panel at Londonvasion, and was also heard on phpBB Weekly #072.

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On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), with a brief cameo from David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s a developer’s paradise on this episode of phpBB Weekly. phpBB 3.0.5 has been released, the “quite furry” edition, and the first phpBB release since late last year. With a slew of bugfixes, changes, and new features, headlining the bunch is a new CAPTCHA “wave” setting (to help improve over the cracked CAPTCHA from four months ago) and the long-awaited ability for users to refresh the displayed CAPTCHA. Improvements have now been made to the auto-updater as well, so if you haven’t gotten into the habit of using the auto-updater, now is a good time, as Phil explains.

But we’re already looking ahead to 3.0.6, as the Development Team has been busy pouring checkins to Subversion with some new backports from the Ascraeus branch. Included in there is a whole new “plugin” system for the CAPTCHA/Visual Confirmation which should make it easier for third-party CAPTCHAs to be incorporated to phpBB, although it will mean that authors of existing CAPTCHA MODs may have to do some rewriting pretty soon. Also backported is support for software-based caching engines such as XCache and eAccelerator, which should produce better (and somewhat more secure) results than phpBB’s current op-cache based system. (At least, that’s my understanding of it–Phil gives a better explanation of it on the show, and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I got it wrong.)

Finally, the Development Team offers up another relic in the form of the phpBB Code Swarm video, and Douglas performs his uniquely epic take on the video, live on the show (as in NOT pre-recorded and NOT practiced at all). For those of you who are wanting to share it, it starts at the 37:30 timestamp.

Oh, and the Development Team is moving up in the world! TerraFrost, an acquisition from the MOD Team, has been promoted from Junior Developer to full-fledged Developer, and bantu (also from the MOD Team) is now a Junior Developer. Congrats, folks! Not to be outdone (or deprived of all of their members), the MOD Team has some new Junior Validators: Balint, CoC, daroPL, and platinum_2007.

The MOD of the Week is Quote User Back Link by Erik Frerejean, and the Style of the Week is aktif by napy8gen.

Finally, the bonus at the end of the show is the William Tell Overture by Spike Jones (Douglas’ inspiration for his code swarm video interpretation).

Meik announced today that the phpBB teams (according to the copyright at the end, it was apparently mainly him) have created a phpBB “Code Swarm” video, which I gather is a visual space-age representation of phpBB development activity from March 2001 (right before the release of phpBB 1.2.1) to May 2009 (obviously, right after the release of phpBB 3.0.5). If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is (you really oughta go full screen for the entire effect):

phpBB code swarm from phpBB on Vimeo.

Now at the end of his announcement, Meik said that “We wish everyone to have fun with this video, simply enjoy it.” Well, if you know us on phpBB Weekly, and me in particular, we’ll be sure to have fun with this video, but not just by simply enjoying it. No, we (mainly I) have to have fun with it in our (my) own special way. So be sure to tune in tomorrow to phpBB Weekly #108 (or wait until it’s released this weekend) for a zany interpretation of the code swarm that might rival the fun we had with BBGourmet, performed live on the show. Sound like fun? Yeah, if the internet can survive it. Until then, later…