phpBB Weekly

I have just been informed that the episode files that I edited for phpBB Weekly #022 and #023 were overridden by TalkShoe’s own recording, despite the fact that my edited uploads were downloading from their servers yesterday. The episodes are supposed to begin and end with the phpBB Weekly theme music, not the little TalkShoe riff.

I am getting in touch with the folks at TalkShoe to find out what is wrong. I apologize for this inconvenience.

Update 7/9: I received a response from TalkShoe Technical Support. Due to a recent series of updates that they rolled out on their website, they found that the mechanism for editing/posting recorded episodes have broken. Because of this, they are currently editing and uploading episodes manually (I can imagine how horrible that must be!). I don’t like to wait for TalkShoe’s recording to be posted, instead preferring to post my edited recording first. Unfortunately, now that their end is being done manually, my uploads have been overwritten. Unfortunately, I don’t have a local copy of the edited episodes because I recently had to clear up some space on my hard drive for a different project.
I have asked TalkShoe if they can try to see if they have a copy of the original files that I uploaded, and hopefully this will be fixed on their end by the next live show (although I have an alternate solution in mind for recording that should avoid this hassle). I’ll keep posting updates as I receive information.

Update 7/10: Unfortunately, TalkShoe does not keep an archive of uploaded episodes, however they have been made aware of the issue and have put in a feature request so that uploaded episodes are not overwritten by the service. In the meantime, I have planned out a minor change to the recording process which should prevent this sort of error from recurring. I will be reuploading phpBB Weekly #022 and #023 myself later today in order to restore the theme music (although the superior sound quality will be lost), but this should be fixed for phpBB Weekly #024. After that, I’m off to Sacramento!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (24.2 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:00:17
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

This episode was supposed to be the first episode with David “Highway of Life” Lewis as our new co-host, but unfortunately, he couldn’t make it. It was still a full episode as Douglas tried to explain MODX without getting too technical or too boring. A big thanks goes out to the many who participated in the show and called in!

Hot off the presses, phpBB is a finalist for the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards for “Best Project for Communications”. It’s a high honor to be winner of this award, so go and vote for phpBB!

In this episode, Douglas gives a brief history of MODX, talks about its advantages and disadvantages, and also talks about the MODX Packaging Guidelines and Versioning System, as well as identifies some resources for MOD authors to use MODX. Many of these can be found at the MODX Resource Centre. It’s also encouraged that MOD authors verify that their MODX package is correct with the mEAL pre-validator tool. There were a few things that the MOD team had not made 100% clear at the recording of this episode. They will probably be submitting me corrections to mistakes that I may have made; these will be mentioned in the comments section of this post and at the beginning of the next show.

The MOD of the Week is Oops – Database Down by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Chairs Template by AngusThermopile.

Douglas will be away in Sacramento on the 14th and at the WordCamp conference on the 21st, so the next live episode will not be until Saturday, July 28th, at the usual time. If there is a big announcement/news from phpBB in the interim, we may release a special episode (not live) to talk about it. Think of this as like my “summer vacation”.

You may know that David Lewis (Highway of Life) joined me on the last two episodes of phpBB Weekly, and to me, at least, he has brought new life to the show. Although I can certainly record things solo, there’s something about me that prefers discussing things with other people instead of just stating my own opinions, and I’ve really enjoyed having David on these past two episodes. In addition, David has an expertise of phpBB3 that I don’t have just yet, because my forte is actually with phpBB2.

And so, after thinking about it and discussing it with him, I am very excited to announce that beginning on episode #023, David will be joining me as co-host of phpBB Weekly! We will both be discussing phpBB news, and of course continuing to do our various segments/tutorials that we’ve done, however we’re going to be sharing the work. Some episodes I’ll be leading a segment/tutorial, and some episodes he will, however we’ll still both be contributing to it during the show. This will also allow us to discuss and share different ideas on phpBB news, etc.

In addition, we will still be inviting people to call in, come in the chat room, or send in e-mails to phpBB Weekly, and having David here will make it even better for us to answer questions and comments because David will be bringing a lot of his own phpBB3 expertise to the table. He will also be given access to this blog, so you may occasionally be seeing him comment on phpBB News instead of me, particularly as we get closer to the phpBB3 Gold release. Of course, I will still be handling all of the technical podcast stuff such as the website, TalkShoe, and editing.

Beyond this, the show format will still be the same. We will continue to cover phpBB News, offer segments on tutorials and comment/review things in phpBB and on phpBB.com, and continue to bring you a new MOD and Style each episode.

Our next episode will be this Saturday, July 7th, and we hope you will join us!