phpBB Weekly

Hello everyone!

We’re still in the middle of our August break and are looking forward to returning next weekend. However, you may have heard today that the deadline for the Best CAPTCHA plugin competition has been extended to Friday, September 4th. That means that if you want to write a CAPTCHA plugin and are still working on it, you’ve still got two weeks left!

Obviously, we’re going to be covering the competition very closely during the month of September, and we want to start by hearing about some of the ideas that you, the phpBB MODding community, have come up with.

Therefore, during the next two weeks, we will be running a small survey asking CAPTCHA plugin authors to tell us all about your CAPTCHA plugins! On phpBB Weekly #121, which will be live on Saturday, September 5th (the day after the submission deadline), we’re going to take a look at the submissions that we receive and discuss them on the show. That’s right, this is a golden opportunity for you to get free exposure to your CAPTCHA plugin, and more exposure might mean more votes in the competition!*

*This does not mean that we will lobby for or against any particular plugin; all coverage of CAPTCHA plugins on phpBB Weekly will be fully objective during the duration of the contest.

Our only requirement is that your plugin must be a stable version and submitted to the MOD Database (and thus qualify for the contest). So what are you waiting for? Fill out our survey after the jump.
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Episode Duration: 1:07:51
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Lorelle VanFossen

Surprise! Sure, we’re on a three week break, but we couldn’t just leave you in the lurch without an episode of phpBB Weekly to regale yourself with. We’re joined on this special non-live episode by one of Douglas’ good friends, Lorelle VanFossen.

Lorelle is primarily affiliated with the community of WordPress, the popular open-source blogging/CMS software. However, we invited her on this show to discuss her experiences with WordCamps, various WordPress community events that have been organized all over the world during the past few years. On this episode, Lorelle shares some of the energizing experiences from past WordCamps that she’s been to and spoken at, and David and Douglas also share some of their experiences from Londonvasion and OSCONvasion.

More importantly, though, Lorelle shares some guidelines for individuals interested in organizing local community meetup events, and share some of her opinions on how the phpBB community could help ignite more local community meetups for our project.

But this podcast isn’t all just talk, this is probably one of the funniest episodes we’ve had to date, because Lorelle is a riot. Without a doubt, one of the craziest moments comes when Douglas shares that he won the grand prize from the OSCON Passport Program, a Pogo Linux Intel Workstation.

Links mentioned in this episode:
Douglas’ Previous Podcast Interview with Lorelle
No Fact Zone
SOBCon
Kickstarter
WordCamp Whistler
Teens in Tech Conference
An Open-Source Look at the Cost of WordCamp Dallas
WordCamp Hong Kong
WordCamp Portland and the Fairy Blogmother
Beer and Blog
Now if those links don’t get you interested in listening to this episode, nothing will!

Other Resources for Organizing Meetups:
Upcoming
Meetup.com
Tips for Planning and Organizing a WordPress Event and WordCamp (via The WordCamp Report)
WordCamp and WordPress Meetups – The Events Heard Round the World (via Lorelle on WordPress)
phpBB Events and Meetings forum
And a new resource for phpBB event/meetup organizers that we’re going to start working on soon…

Find Lorelle at…
Lorelle on WordPress
The WordCamp Report
Camera on the Road
Her AWESOME book: Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging
… and almost every WordCamp event out there!

That said, enjoy this special episode of phpBB Weekly, and join us when we return on Saturday, August 29th at 1 PM EDT (1700 UTC) when we return live on uStream!

The phpBB Weekly website is back after a prolonged outage of nearly eight hours, during which the layout of our site was transitioned in preparation for our move to uStream. Although most of the changes were behind the scenes, there are a few new things to look at on the site. But first the important part…

Everyone who subscribes to the phpBB Weekly podcast feed needs to change their feed URL!

As before, the feed for the phpBB Weekly blog is still separate from the podcast feed. Our blog feed has not changed. Our new podcast feed, however, is as follows:
http://www.phpbbweekly.net/feed/podcast/

Starting with episode #119, that feed will contain the Enhanced AAC version of phpBB Weekly. Enhanced AAC is the preferred version because it will have a smaller filesize and some nice features like chapter markers and hyperlinks. However, Enhanced AAC is primarily compatible with QuickTime, iTunes, and other iDevices.

If Enhanced AAC is not desirable for you, we have an alternate feed that will continue to contain MP3 versions of the show:
http://www.phpbbweekly.net/feed/podcastmp3/

Read on for details on how to make this change in iTunes and other feed readers, and more on some of the other new features on our site.
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Episode Duration: 1:29:49
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Tom Beddard (subBlue)

On this episode, we’re joined by a very special guest, Tom Beddard (subBlue), the designer of the subSilver and prosilver themes for phpBB2 and phpBB3, respectively. We chatted with Tom about his experiences working with phpBB and with the teams, and what it’s like to write a completely new phpBB style from scratch (unlike most phpBB styles which are usually based somewhat on either subSilver/subsilver2 or prosilver). He also shared some thoughts for people interested in making styles for phpBB. (If you want a good read, be sure to check out his featurette on designing prosilver.)

David and Douglas also spend a bit of time discussing the future of community bulletin boards, and whether or not they may be on the decline in the future what with all the other new means of communication popping up around the internet. In the course of the conversation, David describes Google Wave and Douglas describes P2 and discuss how bulletin boards could borrow some of these ideas to improve usability and become more like a modern web application.

There is no MOD or Style of the Week. Our last phpBB Weekly Poll Question was “What would be the coolest CAPTCHA plugin to have installed on your board?” Here are the answers:
“If they’re using Internet Explorer 6, who cares if they’re a bot or not? You know what to do with them…” 10 votes / 56%
“Ask the user what CAPTCHA stands for. If they know the correct answer, they’re probably a robot.” 3 votes / 17%
“Ask them to explain why the front REALLY fell off. That will weed out bots AND Australian senators.” 2 votes / 11%
“Attempt a Jedi mind trick on the user. If it doesn’t work, they’re probably a robot, or too smart to feel at home on your board anyway.” 1 vote / 6%
“Burn them at the stake. If they survive, they’re probably a robot. (Well, it worked at the Salem Witch Trials, right?)” 1 vote / 6%
And 1 “Other” answer:
“Pick the Bertie -captcha.”
Total Votes: 18

Finally, Douglas and David announce that this episode is our last episode on TalkShoe, because we are moving to uStream! They give a rundown of all of the details. As a reminder, there will be no live episodes on August 15 or 22; our next live show will be on Saturday, August 29. That episode will be our first episode broadcasting on uStream, and our first episode to adopt our new 1 PM EDT recording time. Keep an eye on phpBBWeekly.net as we make this transition over the next few weeks.

Finally, we close out the show by wishing a happy birthday to Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) in our usual phpBB Weekly way.

That’s right. I’m sure that many people would respond to that title saying, “Finally!” Personally I’m having a hard time believing it. Interestingly enough, the only reason phpBB Weekly exists is because one day, about a month or two after I’d discovered TalkShoe, I decided that I wanted to try out their whole “talkcast” thing, and thus phpBB Weekly was born. However, a lot has changed since the day when phpBB Weekly was just me planning to answer questions from people calling in wanting help with phpBB (which never materialized, actually), where TalkShoe handled all of the recording and all that. Now we discuss stuff in great detail on the show, we record and edit locally in relatively high quality (compared to TalkShoe), we have guests joining us frequently, we have a very active and contributive chat room that listens live, and we’ve frequently had lots of people asking us to switch from TalkShoe to something better. After doing some research and tests this past week, I’d say we’ve finally found phpBB Weekly’s successor to TalkShoe: uStream.

Just Give Me a Quick Summary:

• This morning’s episode #118 was our last episode ever on TalkShoe. Beginning with phpBB Weekly #120 on Saturday, August 29, we will be streaming live on uStream. (Episode #119 will be a non-live episode released sometime during our two-week break.)
• We will be launching a new podcast feed managed here on phpBBWeekly.net, replacing the previous feed. All subscribers will need to update their feed URLs at that time to continue receiving our episodes! Details of this changeover will be announced when it is implemented in the next two weeks.
• Our website, phpBBWeekly.net, will be taken down on Wednesday, August 12, starting at 11 AM EDT (1500 UTC) for downtime to reorganize the site to reflect our change to uStream and our time change to 1 PM Eastern.

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