phpBB Weekly

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the very late notice about this, but I’m going to make the decision to cancel tomorrow’s episode of phpBB Weekly. This past week has been an extremely busy week for me and I haven’t found any time at all to prepare for the episode (heck, I haven’t even gotten time to edit last weekend’s episode yet!). I’ve also got a lot of other things that I’ve got to get to work on this weekend, and it’s my birthday weekend as well, so I’ll hopefully be spending some time with family. So primarily to avoid a bunch of stress, I’m making the executive decision of giving us a week off to catch up. We will be back on October 4th, when we’ll be doing another part of our segment on Building a Successful Community. As for phpBB Weekly #079, I will be editing it this weekend and getting it released, so stay tuned.

Thanks for your understanding!
–Douglas Bell

UPDATE 9/29: TalkShoe’s data center suffered a critical outage this weekend which is still affecting their website, and as such, I’m currently unable to upload the episode. I’ll get the episode uploaded as soon as their website is fixed.

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Episode Duration: 58:47
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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We actually had the chance to carve out a shorter episode of phpBB Weekly today, thanks to the fact that the recent surge in phpBB news has finally started to calm down. We took more of a MOD author’s/developers angle on this episode of phpBB Weekly.

For starters, MODX 1.2.1 is out. This update mostly consists of an updated XSL which brings a long some nice user interface enhancements, and gives Douglas the opportunity to rediscover how much better MODX has become since the last time he looked at it seriously a year or two ago. (We won’t rewrite the changes in MODX 1.2.1 here when you can see them by clicking on the link.) Plus, David also talks about the possibility of introducing new action tags into MODX in the future and asks for feedback from MOD Authors on what they would like to see. More about MODX is available at the MODX Resource Centre, and you can also see a sample of MODX 1.2.1.

Then, we go into-depth with the new phpBB Code Wiki, and discuss in-depth the purposes of the wiki, what kind of articles can be found on the wiki, and most importantly, how anyone can help contribute to the wiki to make it better. Our discussion is based on a blog post about the wiki that David posted last week.

The MOD of the Week is Upcoming Birthday List by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is RedSilver 3 by jozomannen.

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Episode Duration: 1:32:51
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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We start out this episode of phpBB Weekly first by taking a look back at last weekend’s MOD Authors Convention and briefly recapping some of it (see last week’s episode for full coverage of the event). Then, we tackle a topic that we didn’t get to last week: a discussion about CAPTCHAs in phpBB, as well as some of the difficulties of utilizing CAPTCHAs in open-source projects, along with a look at some of the other efforts at preventing spambot registration on various websites. The moral of the story: whatever you do, turn on User Activation in your phpBB Settings, because no CAPTCHA is perfect.

Then, we turn to the first part of our segment on “Building a Successful Community,” in which Douglas and David discuss the things that a user who wants to create a brand new community needs to plan out from the start, and the skills and qualities that new administrators will need for their community to be successful in the long run. Most of the content for this segment comes out of Patrick O’Keefe’s book, Managing Online Forums.

The MOD of the Week is th23 Domain by th23, and the Style of the Week is Black Pearl by Mighty Gorgon.

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Episode Duration: 1:27:33
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Paul Sohier (Paul)

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The news media is busy traveling from one convention in Denver to another in St. Paul, and that means that they’re all ignoring the most important convention of all: the 2008 phpBB MOD Authors Convention! Well, we didn’t, and our panel of experts (Douglas, David, and Paul) report live from the MOD Authors Convention, providing their analysis of the events and presentations of the convention, as well as wondering why the MOD team didn’t nominate someone to run for president.

Anyway, we did discuss the various sessions at the MOD Authors Convention and talk about some of the highlights that were discussed. For example, in the “future of MODding” session, there was a certain amount of discussion about the possibility of introducing “Junior Validators” into the validation process. If this went forward, this would be like allowing certain users to be able to participate in the “testing” phase of validation, but not the line-by-line/security/etc. phases, and could also serve as a way for the MOD team to evaluate possible new additions to the team.

We also recapped the announcement that Paul hinted about last week, which was that the MOD team’s MOD pre-validator (MPV) tool is now publicly available. We discuss MPV in detail, including how it works and how it compares to the previous mEAL tool that was chiefly written by David Smith (smithy_dll).

There was also discussion at the convention about the phpBB Wiki (which was formally announced towards the end of the day), which will serve as the primary source of development, MODding, and (possibly) styling documentation for phpBB, and like all wikis will be user-contributable. We talked a bit more about the Wiki and how the MOD team’s goal of streamlining its documentation (we’ve talked about this a few times recently) ties into this new announcement.

And of course, this episode took place during the second “phpBB3 MODding & Best Practices” session, which was supposed to be David’s session, except he kinda played hooky from that so he could join in on this episode. However, he does summarize the main points from his session for us, answers a few questions from us, and fields requests from our chat room and from the #phpbb-mod channel to publish his session as a book.

Additional links mentioned in this episode:
MAMP/MAMP Pro
Wiki article: Creating Modules for phpBB3
Wiki article: Adding Modules to phpBB3

And finally, we ran out of time to mention it on this episode, but you should really check out the recent blog post on CAPTCHAs in phpBB, which gives a very interesting look at the evolution of phpBB’s CAPTCHA (aka “visual confirmation image”) and some of the inherent problems with CAPTCHAs and other anti-spambot security techniques.

The MOD of the Week is Tabulated Survey at Topic Head by asinshesq, and the Style of the Week is prosilver Special Edition by Styles Robot (or, more accurately, the phpBB.com Styles Team).

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