phpBB Weekly

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.

EDIT: If you’re seeing a big gap in between the page content and the sidebar in your web browser, it means your browser is still loading a cached version of the stylesheet. Refresh the page once or twice and everything should be fixed.

Welcome back! After about six hours of downtime (and about two additional days of work beforehand), the renovated phpBB Weekly website is now online!

Those of you who have been around awhile will remember that around this time last year we launched the new version of our website (the one with the cool translucency stuff and the Mars background); well, we’re still using the same theme as we did then. However, last August, we went through a major transition as we stopped using TalkShoe and started using uStream to do our live episodes. Though we made a few changes then, our website hadn’t been completely optimized to replace all of the functionality that we lost when we stopped using TalkShoe. Today’s renovation finishes up the job–although the design remains the same, most of our website has seen some significant changes and improvements.
(more…)

UPDATE 10/16: We now have a new Clerk! (Actually, we’re changing the name to Executive Assistant.) A big thanks to Sam Jackson (aka sljaxon) who is now helping us out, and doing a great job!
(more…)

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.
(more…)

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.
(more…)