phpBB Weekly

Thanks to Adam Reyher (AdamR) of the Support Team for recording and editing this video of our “Berties of a Feather” session at OSCONvasion. He dealt with a number of unexpected technical difficulties, which is why it took two weeks to get this video posted. You can check out the video on Blip.tv or watch it in the player below.

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Episode Duration: 1:28:07
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

Okay, maybe the title of this episode overstates it just a little bit, but there’s no doubt that this past week’s announcement of some major phpBB development changes has significant and far-reaching impacts to the phpBB community, which will significantly affect how future phpBB releases are managed and supported. Most importantly, these changes help to clarify the groundwork for Ascraeus (which will now be phpBB 3.1, not 3.2), subsequent releases after Ascraeus, and the eventual phpBB4 coming a few years down the road. Probably most significant, the new roadmap will allow new features (that don’t require a significant rewrite of the phpBB core code) to be brought in to phpBB 3.x sooner than has been the habit with prior releases of phpBB.

On this episode, we go into very hefty detail about both the short-term and long-term impacts of these changes to phpBB’s release strategy, and of course, we’ll be keeping a very close eye going forward as these changes start to become implemented with future phpBB releases.

We also spent a bit of time discussing the fun that took place at the recent phpBB Developer Meeting in Cologne, Germany. Not only is it clear that Bertie had a good time, but a lot of discussion took place, some decisions were made (with the aforementioned development changes likely being one of them), and some touring of the city also took place. We also discussed a bit about the next official phpBB event, which will likely be held in New York City sometime in 2010 (“Libertyvasion”), though obviously it may be a few more months before details come out from the teams.

Finally, we briefly covered a few highlights from some recent commits to the Subversion repository for 3.0.6 (subscribe to the SVN mailing list). There are even more new features coming in 3.0.6 now, such as the ability to report private messages and the ability for a moderator to delete all unread private messages in a user’s outbox (anti-spam measure).

The MOD of the Week is Static Pages by ameeck, and the Style of the Week is Quilting ‘n’ Sewing by billstur.

Be to join us on next week’s episode, when Tom Beddard (subBlue) will join us as our special guest!