phpBB Weekly

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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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.

Well, August is nearly upon us. Not only is this going to be a significant month for me personally, as I will be moving away to university in Washington, DC in only two weeks, but it’s also going to be a very significant month for phpBB Weekly, as the show will be featuring some very exciting episodes and significant changes this month.

Tomorrow, we will kick-start the month of August with an in-depth look at the significant development changes announced earlier this week and the recent developer meeting in Germany. These are major announcements that will have far-reaching impacts for the entire phpBB community, and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty, Support Team Leader) will be joining us tomorrow to discuss it.

The following Saturday, August 8th, we will be joined by Tom Beddard (subBlue). Tom is the designer of phpBB’s subSilver and prosilver themes, both editions of the phpBB.com website, and has done lots of other excellent design work. He’s not a very active member of the phpBB.com community, so the opportunity to have him on phpBB Weekly is a very unique one. We’re very grateful to him for setting some of his time aside to join us, and I encourage you to share any questions you’d like us to ask him.

phpBB Weekly will not be live on August 15 or 22 as a result of my cross-country move. However, sometime during that break, we will release a special non-live episode consisting of an interview with a good friend of mine, Lorelle VanFossen. Although she is mainly active within the WordPress community, she has a lot of experience working with local organizers of WordCamp events, and so we’re going to talk a bit about what organizers of local meetups/events should know. (This is part of our effort to encourage more phpBB users to organize local events in their area.) We’ll also talk a bit about some of her other contributions to the WordPress community, and her awesome book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging. (The interview will be non-live because all of her Saturdays through December are booked speaking at WordCamps and other events!)

phpBB Weekly will return from our break on Saturday, August 29th, however starting on that date, the show will be moving to a brand new timeslot: 1 PM EDT/1700 UTC (aka one hour later). This will be a much more convenient time for us, and hopefully more convenient for those of you who tune in as well. This new time is subject to change (although very unlikely). We have a number of interesting plans for our episodes in the fall, so we’re looking forward to keeping the phpBB Weekly momentum going! (And does anyone want to wager a bet on whether or not David will be back with us full time once September rolls around?)

So there’s the exciting plans for next month here on phpBB Weekly. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned…

Meik announced today that the phpBB teams (according to the copyright at the end, it was apparently mainly him) have created a phpBB “Code Swarm” video, which I gather is a visual space-age representation of phpBB development activity from March 2001 (right before the release of phpBB 1.2.1) to May 2009 (obviously, right after the release of phpBB 3.0.5). If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is (you really oughta go full screen for the entire effect):

phpBB code swarm from phpBB on Vimeo.

Now at the end of his announcement, Meik said that “We wish everyone to have fun with this video, simply enjoy it.” Well, if you know us on phpBB Weekly, and me in particular, we’ll be sure to have fun with this video, but not just by simply enjoying it. No, we (mainly I) have to have fun with it in our (my) own special way. So be sure to tune in tomorrow to phpBB Weekly #108 (or wait until it’s released this weekend) for a zany interpretation of the code swarm that might rival the fun we had with BBGourmet, performed live on the show. Sound like fun? Yeah, if the internet can survive it. Until then, later…

You may be aware that phpBB Weekly went advertisement-free about two months ago, which I’m quite frankly glad about, and hoping that we’ll continue to be advertisement-free for a good while. Nevertheless, we do want to point out that phpBB Weekly is a labor of love that does require quite a few hours of time each week to help make this show possible (and, for that matter, interesting)–time that we donate for the cause of helping the community. As well as a bit of money that goes towards expenses for hosting, editing software, Skype costs, etc.

Therefore, we always invite you to head over to our Donate page and make a donation to help support the production of phpBB Weekly. Donations are not tax-deductible or anything, but they do help us to support phpBB Weekly and hopefully keep it going for many more months and years to come. Plus, if you donate, you can optionally select to be publicly featured on a “Donor Wall” that will appear on the Donate page of our website!

In lieu of advertising, every six months or so, we will be posting a little reminder like this that we do accept donations for the show. Thanks for your support and continued enjoyment of phpBB Weekly.