phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:10:46
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

This after-Thanksgiving episode of phpBB Weekly was interesting because we hadn’t really planned as much for the episode as we should have because we were busier planning for Thanksgiving, however through debates, discussion, and question answering, we were able to take a single, short topic and extended it out to make an entire show, to our surprise.

We start the show by giving our birthday wishes to David, whose birthday will be on Monday, November 26th, and we also go over some of the new features of phpBB Weekly’s website.

Following a recent announcement on Star Trek Guide in which David updated to a CVS version of phpBB3, we question him on his motives. It turns out that there will be an eighth release candidate for phpBB3 which will be coming out very soon. We discuss the new release a bit and also take a look at what it means for the timing of the final release. As the show lingers on, we end up having a bit of a heated discussion about phpBB3 vs. phpBB2, and we also talk a bit about phpBB3′s release cycle after 3.0.0 “Olympus” is released.

Additional links mentioned: phpBB 3.x Feature Tracker, Google Webmaster Tools

The MOD of the Week is Evil Quick Reply for phpBB3 by eviL<3 and the Style of the Week is Vista for phpBB3 by HelterSkelter.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

Well, phpBBWeekly.net was gone for pretty much the full day. I must admit, the site redesign took longer than anticipated, and indeed, I spent the whole day working on this thing. Considering the size of my to-do list, you can imagine that I wasn’t too pleased either.

However, the new phpBB Weekly website is about 95% complete. You’ll notice that it looks pretty similar–we are still using the same theme as we did before. We are, however, going to be getting a brand new header image for the site which is being designed by my same friend who did our album artwork, and that will be added when he gets it finished sometime this weekend. This, along with a few other backend tweaks, are some things that are yet to be done and make up the remaining 5% of the work.

In my opinion, the redesigned site looks a lot better and is much better organized. Gone is the huge home page with enough text on it to make any newcomer scream out loud. The blog itself now constitutes the front page of our website, and that big, red, impossible-to-miss box at the top is where the preview of the next episode is posted. There’s also a much shorter summary of the podcast and this website on the sidebar, but all of the other information has been moved onto our newly consolidated About and Participate pages.

We are now fully integrating tags into the website and all of the posts. This means that if you are interested in a particular topic, you can go to our Tags page and see all of the topics that have been mentioned on our show and on our blog. We also have a new archives viewer on the site as well. All of the posts now come with a ShareThis button so that you can easily share them with a friend or on a social networking site, and all of the comments are now Gravatar enabled. A number of other smaller changes have also been made to bring the site up-to-date with how far our podcast has come since this site was first launched almost eight months ago.

We hope you enjoy the site, and we’ll probably be talking a bit more about what’s new on phpBB Weekly #040 tomorrow. And of course, keep an eye on our website as we finish up the last few features and get them deployed. See you tomorrow for phpBB Weekly!

Hello everyone,

We’re going to be doing some shuffling and reorganizing of the phpBB Weekly website this upcoming weekend. Although we won’t be bringing around any radically new designs or anything (and no, we do not plan to dress this website up in Christmas lights), we’re going to make some changes to improve the organization of our site and make it a bit more intuitive. phpBB Weekly has grown exponentially since I threw this site together almost eight months ago, and so hopefully the new site will provide us with more emphasis on what we want out of our website.

That said, we have scheduled downtime for this Friday, November 23rd, starting at approx. 11 AM Eastern time (1600 UTC), and will last for a few hours, depending on how long it takes for the technology gods to cooperate. In the meantime, you will still be able to access all of our phpBB Weekly episodes via our TalkShoe page. Or, since it’s the day after Thanksgiving anyway, you can probably find some “Black Friday” store sale somewhere or perhaps fatten yourself up on some of the Turkey Day leftovers in your fridge.

Anyway, have a good Thanksgiving Day, and we’ll see you on Saturday for our next phpBB Weekly!

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Episode Duration: 1:26:00
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

We were hoping that this episode of phpBB Weekly just might turn out to be a shorter show, but apparently it wasn’t going to happen. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a rather interesting and informative show that came bundled with a rather interesting and informative live audience.

phpBB3′s Permissions system is one of the most powerful and most comprehensive new features, but also one of the most intimidating, as Douglas can tell you from experience. We go through the basics of using phpBB3′s permissions system and also look at a number of common things that can confuse people about the system (like why no one can see the forum you just created or the difference between Yes, No, and Never). For more information on the Permissions system beyond what we’ve covered in this episode, check out the Flash tutorials on managing forums and on custom usergroups. You can also check out the Setting Permissions quick start guide, or the more detailed section on users and forum permissions.

Then, Douglas gives us a phpBB History Lesson, as we take a look back to the release of phpBB 2.0.11 which took place exactly three years ago on November 18, 2004. We look back at the highlighting exploit that caused that released and which caused the infamous Santy worm of December 2004 which defaced over 40,000 phpBB-based bulletin boards and hurt phpBB’s security reputation, and we look at some of the changes that the phpBB teams in response to the uproar. Josh W. (A_Jelly_Doughnut), one of the MOD Team members, also comes on briefly to look back at the Santy worm with us. Finally, we take a look at what has changed with security in phpBB3 and the various steps that have been taken by the teams in the last three years to ensure that nothing like this happens again.
Additional links mentioned:
howdark.com “exploits”
howdark.com exploits – follow up
phpBB 2.0.11 released – Critical update
phpBB 2.0.11 upgrade reminder
Netcraft: Santy Worm Spreads Through phpBB Forums

The MOD of the Week is User Shield for phpBB2 by Wo1f, and the Style of the Week is DAJ_Glass for phpBB2 by Krezno.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

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Download MP3 Episode (60.9 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:46:26
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and David M. (DavidMJ)

We thought that we were going to do this episode of phpBB Weekly on Skypecasts, but we encountered problems with their service that made TalkShoe feel like the utopia of live audio streaming, so we decided to move back, and indeed, a brand new bugfixed update of TalkShoe was waiting for us. After spending some time talking about our interesting phpBB Weekly plight, congratulating David’s brother Francis Lewis (Handyman) for becoming a MOD Team member (the first time when two brothers have both been on the teams!), and talking about the recent Joomla!-phpBB meetup, we welcomed phpBB Developer DavidMJ as special guest for the show.

With DavidMJ, we talk about some of the many changes in phpBB3 over phpBB2, particularly in the areas of security and the improved accessibility of the codebase for MOD and style authors. DavidMJ also tells us about his particular areas of expertise in phpBB3, the database management system (DBMS). We also discuss the question over phpBB2′s fate, how much longer phpBB3 will support PHP 4, and some technical info on the various optimizations in phpBB3, and much more.

The MOD of the Week is Instant Post Redirect for phpBB3 by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Holiday Style for phpBB3 by Echo. (Yes, we did unintentionally pick styles from the same author on two consecutive episodes.)
Also, as the holiday season gets closer, we’re asking you to recommend any holiday-related MODs and Styles to us to feature on the upcoming episodes of phpBB Weekly. If you have one to recommend, bookmark it on del.icio.us with the tag “phpbbwmod” or “phpbbwstyle” and we’ll consider promoting it on the show.

Editor’s Note: Apologies for the time it took to release this episode. I was having some difficulties getting my editing software to work properly until Apple pushed out an updated release which fixed everything. I look forward to when we’ll stop having technical difficulties on this podcast!

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.