phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:02:19
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

On this episode, Douglas had just gotten back from Washington, D.C., and was thawing out. (Actually, make-up work from his week-long absence is the reason why this episode took so long to get released; sorry about that.) Nevertheless, we somehow accomplished David’s continual quest for “shorter episodes” with a release that is just barely over an hour. Not too shabby. And they said it couldn’t be done.

In addition to a bit of reflection from the inauguration, we pretty much covered some of the recent news. David gave us a preview of the upcoming release of MODX 1.2.2 (which has actually now been released, but we’ll talk about that on our next episode), and then he mentioned that a new variation on phpBB’s CAPTCHA has been committed to Subversion for 3.0.5 that will allow you to add a “wave” to the CAPTCHA image. (See the before and after.) Douglas also shares some of his experiences with reCAPTCHA, a good alternative CAPTCHA service for those of you who want a CAPTCHA that’s a little bit more humane. (Anyone want to write a phpBB3 MOD for it?)

David and Douglas also cover the recent blog post on fighting CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) and the measures that phpBB takes (and MOD authors should take) to help protect against CSRF. And in passing, David also shares that a new Junior Developers Team has started, and the developers have put together a very comprehensive page on how you can get involved with phpBB development.

Last week’s Poll Question of the Week was “Do YOU think there’s a government plan to close down the internet?” There were 2 votes (16.67%) saying “Yes, there certainly is.”; 4 votes (33.33%) saying “No way, this is just a crazy conspiracy theory.”; 5 votes (41.67%) saying “The government is watching every move I make, therefore I cannot provide a definitive answer to this question.”; and 1 vote (7.14%) saying “How the heck should we know? Or care?”. This week’s poll question is “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on February 7th.

The MOD of the Week is IGN Style Colored Names by Trel, and the Style of the Week is twilightBB by Daniel Exe.

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Episode Duration: 1:29:28
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

On this non-live “Anything Goes” episode, Douglas is joined by the “Spokane Clan”–David Lewis, Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle). They’re all from Spokane, all bigwigs on StarTrekGuide, and are all celebrating the retirement of phpBB2 while Douglas continues mourning it.

The main topic of conversation is the recent blog post on session integration and other ways of integrating phpBB with your website. While we (and by we, we mean David) have discussed this before, we go significantly in-depth on the subject in this episode, including integrating the sessions, auths, templates, languages, DBAL–essentially the entire framework of phpBB in order to allow your website to seamlessly integrate with phpBB. WARNING: This is one of our much more technical topics and likely not intended for the faint-hearted. Most of the things we discussed can be found as articles on the phpBB Development Wiki.

Douglas was also on WordPress Weekly the other day, and one of the topics of conversation included bridges between phpBB and other platforms (such as Joomla!, WordPress, etc.). We extend that conversation on bridges a bit as well, and we’ll go a bit more in-depth on a number of bridge solutions that have popped up during the year 2008 on upcoming episodes of phpBB Weekly.

Finally, an interesting topic on phpBB.com’s General Discussion forum asked Is there a Government Plan to Close Down the Internet? We discuss the merits of this conspiracy theory but also chat a bit about the deeper serious issue of Net Neutrality. If you want to learn more about Net Neutrality and what you can do to protect it, visit SaveTheInternet.com.

Last week’s Poll Question of the Week was “What do you think of phpBB Weekly’s new website?” There were 11 votes (78.57%) saying “Wow, it’s awesome!”; 2 votes (14.29%) saying “Not as good as it was before.”; and 1 vote (7.14%) with No Opinion. This week’s poll question is “Do YOU think there’s a government plan to close down the internet?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on January 24th.

The MOD of the Week is Print a Post Mod by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is Glass Softblue (and other color choices as well) by DoubleJ.

Credit for our fake sponsor of the week goes to A Prairie Home Companion – Garrison Keillor.

As a reminder, phpBB Weekly will not be live on January 17th, but will return live during our usual timeslot on January 24th.

Just a heads up for those of you who may be interested that I will be interviewed on WordPress Weekly this Friday, January 9th at 8 PM EST (0100 UTC on Saturday 1/10). Like our show, WordPress Weekly is a live podcast recorded on TalkShoe by Jeff Chandler (Jeffro2pt0), a good friend of this show, and he does a really good job with WordPress Weekly. We’ll likely talk a bit about phpBB Weekly, discussions on phpBB vs. WordPress from a code and/or interface standpoint, and maybe some of my experience with personal blogging (a subject that has nothing to do with phpBB whatsoever).

As a TalkShoe-based podcast, you can join-in to WordPress Weekly the same way you join in on our show (just use Call ID 34224 instead). Just wanted to mention it in case you’re interested in listening in!

Just a reminder, phpBB Weekly will NOT be live on January 10th or 17th. We will be releasing a non-live episode (#094) during the interim, and our next live episode will be on January 24th.
–Douglas Bell, Co-Host of phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:14:52
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

This weekend, we mark phpBB Weekly’s second anniversary (that right, can you believe we’ve been doing this for two years now?) and the beginning of the year 2009. But that also brings with it some other news, which may or may not be disappointing depending on your point of view: phpBB2 has been officially retired and support for phpBB2 has ended. We take a look at the end of support announcement and look down the road and discuss how phpBB2 will be further phased out over the next few weeks and months. And Douglas is once again very disappointed about the news, while David tries to tell him to get over it.

However, if you didn’t already notice, we launched a new website for ourselves, and so we spend a bit of the beginning of the episode reviewing what has changed on our website and on our podcast, as well as providing a glimpse of some further changes that may be coming down the road.

The MOD Team continues to make waves with the announcement that the MPV (MOD pre-validator) source code has been released in the MODX Tools repository of the phpBB Code Forge, plus it can now run on any site without the need to have phpBB installed. We discuss the reasons for releasing the MPV source and David also attempts to describe some of the other tools under development in the MODX Tools repository. He couldn’t remember all of them, however, so we’ll probably make some corrections next week.

Finally, there will be a phpBB Meeting in Scotland, UK on Saturday, January 24th. We discuss a bit of the activities that will be happening there; we’re not sure yet if we’ll be doing anything special in connection with the meetup on the 24th or not, so stay tuned. Plus, Douglas has decided to do something about his own pipe dreams and has posted a topic looking for interest in a San Francisco phpBB conference/meetup this summer, and David and Douglas discuss some of the logistics of that, if it happens. Plus, Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic) also shares some perspective on both of these via the chat room.

The MOD of the Week is Prime Birthdate Require by primehalo, and the Style of the Week is Revolution by Semi_Deus. Also, our first-ever phpBB Weekly poll question for this week is “What do you think of the new phpBB Weekly website?” Vote in the poll on the right sidebar on our website, and we’ll evaluate the responses to the poll on our next episode.

2009 is here, and we’re ready for another great year of phpBB Weekly! Thanks for listening, as always.

I am very excited to welcome you to the new and improved phpBB Weekly website, completely renovated for 2009. This new website stemmed from an album artwork proposal that David made last April and which we adopted to bring our design a bit more in-line with phpBB3/Olympus, now that phpBB2 has been formally retired. The new design and layout for this site has been in development for the past four weeks under the secret codename “Area52.” (Because Area51 would have been too obvious.) Along with the new website, we also have new album artwork and new banners (find them on the Promote page), as well as a couple of new things we’re going to start doing on the show. Read on to get a full overview of what’s new…
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