phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 41:11
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

We return from our two week vacation from TalkShoe to bring you an episode chalk full of announcements. First off, our own David Lewis is now on the MOD Team: Douglas leads the congratulations and also talks a bit about what it will mean for the show. It’s official: phpBB won the Sourceforge Community Choice Award for Best Project for Communications, beating out YaBB, Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim), and many other projects. This means that Bertie has a new Thingamagoop to play with and phpBB has major boasting rights for the next year. David and Douglas talk a bit about the other winning projects, the awards ceremony in Oregon, and thank the phpBB community for coming together to vote for phpBB. It’s also someone’s birthday today, and we report that the version number of the phpBB3 CVS has been upped from 3.0.RC4-dev to 3.0.RC4. Sure enough, less than half an hour after this show ends, phpBB3 Release Candidate 4 is released.

David couldn’t stay very long due to his job calling him away to Dallas, Texas without warning this weekend, so his planned segment on phpBB3 modules will be postponed until a few weeks off. However, Douglas talks a bit about the MOD Team’s release of MODX 1.0.1 this week, covering what’s new, and then sharing some of his opinions of MODX and where the MOD Team should focus to improve the accessibility of MODX.

The MOD of the Week is Guest See Only First Post by Wicher, and the Style of the Week is Glass by DoubleJ. If you’d like to point out a noteworthy MOD or Style for us to feature on the show, bookmark it on del.icio.us with the tag “phpbbwmod” or “phpbbwstyle” (without quotes), and we’ll see about mentioning it on a future episode!

Join us for phpBB Weekly #026 next week when Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), phpBB Support Team Leader, will be joining us as a guest host! More info can be found on the phpBB Weekly homepage.

I’m excited to announce that the Submit Your Questions form is now back online after being down for a little while. It turned out that it was never broken, however it was being hammered by comment spammers to the point where Gmail was marking EVERY e-mail sent through there as spam, meaning it went straight to the spambox and not to my inbox, where I would never know that it existed. Essentially, I took it down for awhile to figure out what to do with the spam.

Thanks to my going to WordCamp this past weekend, I met Lorelle VanFossen, and a not-quite-so-recent entry on her blog mentioned that someone had written an integration of the Contact form plugin that I was using with Akismet. I’ve now installed it and re-enabled the form, and will try to check Gmail’s spambox frequently to make sure things aren’t going in there (hitting “Not Spam” a couple of times should do the trick!).

As a reminder, the Submit Your Questions form is intended for anyone who is unable to join in the chat room or call in live when we record the show on Saturdays; you can instead fill out the form with a question for us to answer on the air in a future episode. (Of course, it’s more fun for us if you call in live, but this makes a great alternative.) Just don’t ask us to come on your website to install something for you, we don’t make house calls.

Anyway, just wanted to pass along the word!

A big congratulations goes out to our very own David Lewis (Highway of Life), who today was accepted on the phpBB MOD Team! As a retired veteran of the MOD Team myself, I can definitely say that both the team and David are in for a big treat. As the teams are preparing for the imminent release of phpBB3, I know that David will contribute a lot to the team with his Olympus expertise.

David will continue to be a part of phpBB Weekly, and we’ll be talking a bit more about David’s promotion and what it will mean for this show this Saturday on phpBB Weekly #025. However, don’t expect this show to contain any insider-team secrets, we’re not trying to get David fired from his new position now, are we?

Now, everyone congratulate David in the usual manner!

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Download MP3 Episode (38.4 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:07:01
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

This special non-live episode of phpBB Weekly was originally planned to be numbered as #023SE, but we had such a great discussion that it turned out to be a full show! This episode welcomes back David Lewis (Highway of Life), this time as our new co-host. We have a very extended discussion about the release of phpBB 3.0.RC3, David’s appearance on an SEO and Internet Tips Talkcast on TalkShoe (and his mention of phpBB Weekly), and about Douglas’ trip this weekend to WordCamp, along with doing a loose comparison between phpBB and the WordPress blogging platform. Enjoy this special episode, and join us on July 28th as we return to our regular live episodes of phpBB Weekly!

Additional links:
WordCamp 2007
Colorize It! by CyberAlien
phpBB3 Changelog
phpBB3 Bug Tracker
Remember to vote for phpBB in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards!

Hi Everyone, apologies for my disappearance for the phpBB Weekly podcast episode #023.
As you know, that episode was recorded live on Saturday, 7-7-07, and here in Nashville Tennessee USA, there was a large convention taking place on that day at LP field (The Titans Stadium), probably the biggest convention Nashville has ever had. Every hotel within 45 minutes of Nashville was booked up solid for the whole week.
Well over 40,000 people traveled from different parts of the Country came to meet at “The Call”. I was involved in some of the preparations for the pre-convention gatherings all day Friday, and the convention itself lasted from 7am to 10pm on Saturday, so I’m still trying to recover from 13 hours in the hot humid sun with sparse amounts of water barely enough to keep me alive and jumping up and down for all 13 hours.
I had forgotten that the Convention landed on the same day as phpBB Weekly, and I had to provide lodging for a large group of people from Walla Walla Washington as they were unsuccessful in locating a hotel, so I was unable to notify Douglas that I would not be able to make it to the show.
This Convention was a once in a lifetime opportunity that I could not miss, but it was a rare occasion, and do plan on joining Douglas on the next episode of phpBB Weekly.
Thanks to all those who did call in or join in the phpBB Weekly live, hopefully you will call in again on our next show.