phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:10:43
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and

Sorry about the late release of this one, caused by schedule difficulties. There are no chapter markers in the AAC version this week in order to prevent delaying this episode even further. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Following up on last week’s marathon discussion with Nils Adermann (naderman), the new Dev Team Leader, we were joined on this episode by Josh Woody, who is the newest member of the Developer Team. He was (and still is) the primary developer behind AutoMOD, which just saw its third release candidate come out last week. In this interview, we take an in-depth look at what AutoMOD is today, how it works, how it has evolved from the old EasyMOD for phpBB2, and what some of the future plans for AutoMOD will be. We also discuss a bit about the possibility of tighter integration between AutoMOD and the core phpBB product in future versions of phpBB–perhaps even as early as phpBB 3.1 “Ascraeus.”

We also open the show with a brief look at an announcement about a failed password brute-force attack on phpBB.com, as well as the exciting news that phpBB will be exhibiting at OSCON 2010 in Portland, Oregon this July.

The MOD of the Week is Ultimate Points by femu, and the Style of the Week is Maroon Fusion by Runspect.

By the way, if you have no idea what the episode title is all about, perhaps you should read this Wikipedia article. Look very closely, and you might figure out the pun.

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Episode Duration: 1:18:28
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lews (Highway of Life), and Nils Adermann (naderman)

This was a special double-length episode of phpBB Weekly which has been edited into two parts in order to keep the download sizes reasonable for everyone. Part 1 was released as phpBB Weekly #136.

We continue our marathon interview with new-Development Team Leader Nils Adermann on this episode, focusing on the Development Team’s early plans for phpBB4 “Rhea.” For the first half of the episode, we piece together the early (read: “not set in stone”) plans on the phpBB Development Wiki, particularly regarding plans to make phpBB4 require PHP 5.3 or later (phpBB 3.1 will require PHP 5.2 or later), as well as the programming goals to make phpBB4 more scalable, extensible, and modularized through stronger utilization of standard PHP libraries and frameworks. (Warning: Lots of highly technical discussion ahead!)

We then look at the phpBB4 Discussion and Request for Comments fora, consider some of the feature suggestions that have been proposed, and also share how members of the phpBB community can submit their own feature suggestions for phpBB4. During the discussion, David tells us about the release of jQuery 1.4, which he’s particularly excited about.

The MOD of the Week is phpBB Smartfeed by MarkDHamill (recommended by Obsidian on StarTrekGuide), and the Style of the Week is Ciquala by Reeshahm.

Be sure to join us on Saturday (back at the normal 1 PM EST/1800 UTC timeslot) where we will be joined by Josh Woody (A_Jelly_Doughnut) who will help us take an in-depth look at AutoMOD RC-3.

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Episode Duration: 58:32
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Nils Adermann (naderman)

This was a special double-length episode of phpBB Weekly which has been edited into two parts in order to keep the download sizes reasonable for everyone. Part 2 has been released as phpBB Weekly #137.

On this episode, we were joined by Nils Adermann (naderman), who had just became the new Development Team leader the day before the episode was recorded. We start by taking a look back at the many contributions made to phpBB by Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) in his nearly seven years on the Development Team and thank him for everything he’s done to help make phpBB what it is today.

Nils then tells us his thoughts about becoming Development Team Leader, and also talks about some of the upcoming plans for the Development Team in preparation for development of phpBB 3.1 “Ascraeus” and phpBB4 “Rhea”. One of the big changes will be a number of efforts to get the phpBB community more directly involved in the development process, possibly including allowing users to submit patches and vote on feature ideas. We also talk about how the developers, junior developers, and QA Team members will be adjusting in preparation for the concurrent development of phpBB 3.1, phpBB4, and the continued maintenance of phpBB 3.0.x.

And in a teaser for the more technical discussion that will take place in the second half of this episode, we close the episode with some discussion about possibly moving from Subversion to Git, through looking at different models of distributed version control systems.

We also want to express our thoughts and prayers for the victims and survivors of last Tuesday’s magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. Please remember that the phpBB community is a global community, and that all of us can help make a difference by supporting the relief efforts in the region. If you are in the U.S., you can text “HAITI” to 90999 to instantly make a $10 tax-deductible contribution to the American Red Cross. Alternatively, here are many other ways you can help support the relief efforts. Any contribution, no matter how small, will help the Haitians who will be in great need of aid and assistance over the next few weeks, so please contribute whatever you can and keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

Stay tuned for the second half of this episode to be released on Thursday, and be sure to join us next Saturday (back at the normal 1 PM EST/1800 UTC timeslot) where we will have an in-depth look at AutoMOD RC-3.

Hello everyone,

Sorry to throw out this unexpected announcement so last-minute, however we are going to be making some last-minute adjustments to our plans for Saturday’s episode of phpBB Weekly.

For those of you who regularly join us live when the show airs, please note that this Saturday’s episode will begin one hour earlier than usual, beginning at 12:00 PM EST/1700 UTC. This time change will only apply to this Saturday’s episode.

The reason for this time change is that we are going to have more topics to discuss than originally anticipated, and are anticipating the discussion of these topics to take as much as 2-3 hours. Therefore this time adjustment is necessary for us to be able to accomplish this while still respecting our personal schedules. However, we know that you all don’t want to listen to a 2-3 hour episode, so Saturday’s episode will be a special double episode of phpBB Weekly. That is, Saturday’s live episode will be edited into two separate episodes (#136 and #137) which will be released next week on Sunday 1/17 and Thursday 1/21, respectively.

So what’s on tap for this Saturday? Well we kind of had a big announcement that recently broke from the phpBB teams. We will actually be joined by Development Team Member Leader Nils Adermann (naderman), who is not only going to join us for our planned discussion on early phpBB4 goals and early feature ideas, but he is also going to tell us a little bit about his recently-announced promotion to Development Team Leader. And we’ll also have some other interesting topics to discuss, including one that David’s excited to talk about: the release of jQuery 1.4. You can see many more details about Saturday’s episode in the episode description on our home page.

So anyway, we’re ready for this marathon double episode of phpBB Weekly, and we hope you are too. Please take our word when we say that if there is one episode of phpBB Weekly that you don’t want to miss out on, then this is it. Hope to see you then!

Update 1/15: Updated the post to reflect today’s Development Team announcement. If you haven’t figured it out, this announcement is the reason that we made this a longer, double episode. Thanks to the teams for giving us a slightly earlier heads-up about this announcement so that we could plan accordingly.

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Episode Duration: 1:21:24
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life), with guests Russ Jackson and Paul Lush of StopForumSpam.com

phpBB Weekly is always at its best when we have special guests on, and this episode was no exception. We are joined on this episode by the co-developers of Stop Forum Spam, a website that maintains a blacklist of known forum spammers, submitted by forum administrators who catch these spam registrations. Russ and Paul discuss a bit about how Stop Forum Spam works, why they built it, and we have a bit of a discussion about how spammers operate. (And as you can guess from the episode title, we spend a little bit of time along the way ranting about Gmail‘s lax treatment of e-mail spammers and about the bad design of Google Wave.) Overall our recommendation is that while Stop Forum Spam is not a tool you should rely 100% on, it can help you identify forum spammers when used in conjunction with other methods, such as the newly registered users group, custom profile fields, CAPTCHA plugisn, etc.

Also Douglas provides an update on his phpBB “Monumental” Meetup in Washington, DC on March 13, which got a nice little mention on phpBB.com last week. And he offers a preview of OSCONvasion 2010, which will take place in Portland, Oregon in late July.

The MOD of the Week (and one of the best ways to integrate Stop Forum Spam on phpBB3) is Anti-Spam ACP by EXreaction, and the Style of the Week is Absolution by PixelRaider (recommended by Tuvok on StarTrekGuide). We also give a special mention to the phpBB Standalone Template Engine by nanothree (recommended by rotsblok on StarTrekGuide).

Be sure to join us on Saturday 1/16 when we will take an in-depth look at the phpBB4 “Rhea” discussions!