phpBB Weekly

I am quite embarrassed to point out something that we have consistently neglected to mention on phpBB Weekly for the last few weeks, even though it is quite a significant event happening within the greater phpBB community: the annual phpBBHacks.com Awards. Probably the most-recognized awards in the phpBB community, these awards go out to Hack/MOD Author of the Year, Hack/MOD of the Year, Style/Template Author of the Year, Style/Template of the Year, Support Forums Member of the Year, Staff Member of the Year, and phpBB of the Year.

With the exception of the Support Forums Member and Staff Member competitions, which are specifically within the support forums of phpBBHacks.com, the other awards are significant indicators of some of the best MODs, Styles, and communities out there for phpBB, and award-winners get to have a lot of bragging rights for the next year.

Voting for the awards ends on Sunday, December 14 at 6:00 PM EST (2300 UTC), so don’t miss this chance to vote now! We’ll be discussing the awards as one of our topics this Saturday, but I wanted to make sure that we told you about this more than a few hours ahead of time.

Today, Eric Faerber (wGEric) announced that he is stepping aside as MOD Team Leader, to be succeeded by Igor Wiedler (eviL<3). This is a very significant announcement, and one that particularly touches both myself and David as we both have served on the MOD Team under Eric’s leadership, and I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect back on this announcement and the many contributions that Eric has made to the MOD Team.

During the past three and a half years, the face and scope of the MOD Team has radically changed. When Eric was first promoted to MOD Team Leader in February 2005, the team’s primary focus was simply on validating MODs in the queue and moderating the MOD development/discussion forums. The team only validated phpBB2 MODs; after all, the first beta of phpBB3 was still fifteen months away, and the only MOD template that was used was the old text-based MOD template. Now, the MOD team no longer accepts new phpBB2 MODifications (and three months from now, will no longer accept any phpBB2 submissions of any kind), and are pretty much exclusively validating phpBB3 MODs. They now exclusively use their MODX template format, and in the span of three and a half years, they not only previewed the XML format to the MODding community and got feedback on it, but have put out multiple iterations of the MODX format, both the XML spec AND two versions of the XSL stylesheet for it. The MOD Team took over EasyMOD, which had originally been a project independently run by Nuttzy, and has released numerous versions of it for phpBB2, and they are now working on a MOD Package Manager (“Blinky”) to provide similar functionality for phpBB3. Following the unexpected move over to the new phpBB3-powered phpBB.com in March 2007, the MOD team completely rebuilt a brand new MOD Database and MOD Queue (as well as a new Styles Database and Queue to boot for the Styles Team) for the new site, and, under pressure, got a beta version of it up and running in just under three months. They organized three MOD Author Conventions (2006, 2007, and 2008) on their IRC channel to improve their back-and-forth communications with the MODding community and receive feedback from MODders. More recently, they have built a new MOD pre-validator for MOD authors to use, launched a phpBB Code Wiki to share MODding and coding documentation, and just last week launched their new Junior Validators team to help them better recruit new validators.

I spent nine months on the MOD team, having been accepted to the team in November 2005, and stepping down in August 2006, when I realized that I am far too busy in my personal life to have the necessary time to contribute to the team. Nevertheless, during the time I spent on the MOD Team, Eric was the team member that I looked up to the most. I was the youngest team member at the time, and at only fourteen years old, I was certainly less mature than I am today. Nevertheless, Eric was always willing to listen to my concerns and was always supportive. And that wasn’t just the case with me, but with the whole team. He epitomizes the best kind of leader: someone who leads by supporting and encouraging his team members to do their best job, and who seeks to listen to the concerns of each of his team members and help to work them out. Despite all the additional responsibilities that he has had as a team leader, he has always led the MOD Team to greatness through the support and encouragement that he has given to his team members, and he is to be greatly commended for it.

Today, Igor takes over from him as MOD Team Leader, and he’s got some awfully big shoes to fill. He is, however, a highly-respected and very knowledgeable member of the MOD community, and he is definitely a good choice for the job. I’m sure that he’ll continue to lead the MOD Team to bold new frontiers (yes, I had to get the Star Trek theme in here somewhere for David’s sake!). And fortunately for us, Eric isn’t leaving the teams for good. He’ll be sticking around with the Team Leaders group (now newly renamed as the “Management Team”) as “Operations Manager.” I don’t know what that means yet, and all Eric said in his announcement was that he’s going to “take a different role with phpBB.” I have a hunch that we’ll find out just how much of a role he’ll be playing soon…

Nevertheless, from the bottom of my heart, thank you Eric for all of the contributions that you have made to the MOD Team and to phpBB over the past few years, and for the work that you will continue to do for phpBB in your new role. Also, congratulations to Igor for his promotion and for the many more contributions that he’ll be making to the MOD Team and to phpBB in the years to come.
–Douglas Bell, phpBB Weekly Co-Host

I’m very excited to announce the beginning of a brand new blog focusing exclusively on the upcoming Londonvasion conference: it’s called Londonvasion Central, which is being run as a short-term sister site to phpBB Weekly. Dubbed the unofficial home of complete Londonvasion coverage, Londonvasion Central will include comprehensive Londonvasion news, spotlights on what will be happening at Londonvasion, live blogging from the event as it takes place, and complete collections of Londonvasion photos, audio recordings, and video from the event.

David and I are getting ready to kick into high gear for the beginning of Londonvasion, which is now only a week and a half away. While our next few episodes of phpBB Weekly will be doing full coverage of the event, I hope you’ll check out Londonvasion Central for more big news from Londonvasion in between our episodes and as it all happens.

Enjoy! Londonvasion (and the wrath of BertieZilla) awaits!
–Douglas Bell

It’s been about three and a half months now since phpBB3′s gold release rocked the galaxy, and so now the hype has simmered down and the devs have rested up and the first big wave of post-release bug reports have rolled in. So now, three and a half months after the release, the Development Team has been working hard on the inevitable 3.0.1 release.

Confirming what David has promised us for these past few months, the Dev Team will be quietly issuing “quality assurance” release candidates of every minor release in an effort to avoid repeating instances of having to issue a new release within days of a previous one (as happened twice in the 2.0.x line and once during phpBB3′s RC stage). Anyone can help themselves to these release candidates (and the QA “Quack and Assassinate” Team will be forced to dive through them), and they will likely materialize into a full version of phpBB 3.0.1 by the end of the week. There will be a mailing list to subscribe to if you want to help test out release candidates when they come out (they will not normally be published on the announcements forum to the general community). As a reminder, while the RCs are not fully complete, the chances are that they will fix more problems than they cause; the purpose of the QA testing is to ensure that they don’t introduce any significant new problems.

So far, the list of changes for 3.0.1 features fifty bugfixes–it’s obvious that the dev teams have been busy, in addition to their recent release of 2.0.23 plus working on the development of Ascraeus.

We have been planning something special for this Saturday’s episode of phpBB Weekly, and thus, we will not be able to discuss phpBB 3.0.1 on our show this week. However, this is just a note to you to keep an eye out for the new release and update! (You know, I hear that the new auto-updater is like super-easy and totally rocks!) If you’re interested in helping to test out the release candidates, feel free to help yourself.

phpBB 3.0.RC6, probably the most hyped release candidate of phpBB so far (and definitely the one release that we’ve talked about more than any other on our show), was just released this afternoon. (Or, if you’re in Europe/Asia, it was released last night.) What’s so significant about this particular release is that it arguably includes the most changes/new features to the phpBB3 codebase since UTF-8 support arrived in Beta3, back last November. (David covered many of these features on episode #033, and we also discussed a few of these on today’s episode #034, which will be released really soon.)

It was also revealed that the phpBB3 codebase security audit was done by independent software security company SektionEins. Their website indicates that they specialize in security audits for web applications, in particular for those based on PHP. Their site also lists a number of stats about Internet attacks, and on episode #034 we talked a bit about some common vulnerabilities that web applications suffer. One of the reasons that phpBB has a bad reputation for security is because many hosts are using much much older versions of phpBB2 that have serious vulnerabilities in them. The phpBB teams over the years have been very good at getting new, fixed releases out in a timely matter, and the majority of the fault for these exploits are forum admins who don’t keep phpBB2 up-to-date, but nevertheless, the phpBB teams have been unfairly blamed many times for these. By having a codebase audit prior to Olympus going gold, phpBB3 will hopefully have a better lifetime than phpBB2 did.

However, Acyd Burn mentioned that the security audit turned up zero SQL injection vulnerabilities and zero Command Code Execution (CCE) vulnerabilities, which is excellent news and really exemplifies some of phpBB3′s superiority to phpBB2 when it comes to security. Considering that there’s over 200,000 lines of code in phpBB3, this is an excellent accomplishment and props for that goes to the Development Team. However, thanks to the security audit, RC-6 does bring along fixes for a few XSS vulnerabilities, a new password hashing mechanism, and a number of other new goodies.

Anyway, be sure that you run, don’t walk, over to the downloads page and download the RC-6 updater! The countdown to phpBB3 is getting nearer, can you feel the excitement?

UPDATE: Acyd Burn has announced that due to some problems with the RC-6 package, a new RC-7 package will be released later today. The teams will be providing auto-update packages for both RC-6 to RC-7 and RC-5 to RC-7. You probably should hold off until the new release this afternoon.
On phpBB Weekly #035, David will probably talk a bit about what happened to necessitate the RC-7 release.

If you are experiencing problems on your board with the RC-6/RC-7 update, read this article which details many problems with MODs and Styles due to the update.