phpBB Weekly

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…

New Website Theme and Album Artwork
Of course, the inspiration for the new site came from the new artwork produced by our own David Lewis, and the background used on the artwork and our new site is by Vlad Gerasimov; you may also recognize it being used on the homepage of phpBB.com. The theme itself is Aerodrome by The Buckmaker, a very beautiful (and quite customizable) three-column WordPress theme. As you can tell, the theme has been significantly customized for this site. I would also like to give a thanks to topdown who made the headphone image on the right-side of the header (it looks so good you’d think it was part of the original theme) and the site’s favicon.

Compatibility note: In my testing, the new site loads best with Safari and other WebKit-based browsers (OmniWeb, Google Chrome, etc.). Firefox and other Gecko browsers (Flock, Camino, etc.) also do a reasonably good job, though you may notice the TalkShoe sidebar widget and some other images “flashing” as you scroll the page. I’m told that this theme suffers in Internet Explorer, though I haven’t tested it since I don’t have a Windows PC handy. (IE users: Do yourself a favor and upgrade to Firefox, Safari, Flock, Chrome, or another modern standards-based browser.) It’s also recommended, for Firefox users in particular, that you have the latest Adobe Flash Player 10 installed.

New Website Features

• We are launching a phpBB Weekly Poll, in which we will ask a different poll question every week on the show and ask you for your vote. You can vote in the phpBB Weekly Poll widget on the right-most sidebar, and view the results. If you have further comments on the poll question, click on the Comments link in the lower-left to add your own comments to the poll question. More info on this will be discussed on phpBB Weekly #093 this Saturday.
• Our Participate page has been completely rewritten, so now it’s much clearer for you to read up on how to join in when the show is live. And is that a video overview I see there as well? Yep…
• We have a new Donate page if you’re feeling generous and would like to support our work. Donors will also be listed on a “Donation Recognition Wall” on that page as well, unless they opt to donate anonymously.
• Almost every week on the show, we pick out a MOD and Style pick of the week. Well, now you don’t have to dig through the episode archives to find our picks, just go to the new Weekly Picks page to see them all in a nice, concise list, along with a list to the episode(s) they were featured on.
• The Zeitgeist just got a lot more useful. No longer just a bunch of numbers, each linked episode now has a short description of what was discussed in that episode in relation to the Zeitgeist category. This hopefully makes it a lot easier to navigate and more useful to discover the great content from our past episodes.
• Blog comments are now threaded, up to five levels deep. This means that you can now reply directly to someone else’s comment. (Kinda reminds you slightly of forums, eh?)
• Though you haven’t seen it yet, going forward, all of our episodes will be given a short name along with their number. This hopefully makes it easier to identify what is discussed on our future shows.
• phpBB Weekly is expanding its reach! Under the Subscribe section of our sidebar, we’ve got links to a number of podcast networks and directories that you can check us out on. Plus, be sure to check out our new Twitter feed and Facebook group.

Feedback?
Despite our best intentions, there likely are going to be some possible bugs or errors that spring up in our new site. If you experience a problem, please let us know by commenting on this post. Similarly, if the new site causes issues with your web browser, again, please describe the issue by leaving a comment. (Screenshots are also helpful.) And of course, if you want to lavish praise, you’re more than welcome to do that by leaving a comment as well. Also, our very first phpBB Weekly Poll question asks you for your feedback on the website, so feel free to go vote in our poll!

So with that, we hope you enjoy the site and that you had a happy new year, and we look forward to seeing you for phpBB Weekly live on Saturday, as usual.
–Douglas Bell, Co-Host, phpBB Weekly