Episode Duration: 1:18:16
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and David Colón (DavidIQ)

The phpBB teams have been working overtime, as we had six big announcements to cover on this episode of phpBB Weekly, five of which were releases. And so on this episode, we take a look at phpBB 3.0.7, phpBB 3.0.7-PL1, Support Toolkit 1.0.0, MODX 1.2.4, and MODX 1.2.5.

We are also joined on this episode by David Colón (DavidIQ), the new MOD Team leader. He tells us about his thoughts on the promotion and also a little bit on plans and goals for the MOD Team.

The MOD of the Week is Topic Preview by VSE, and the Style of the Week is mxPublisher by Culprit.

Be sure to join us either in person or on the show next week, where we will be broadcasting live from the “Monumental” Meetup in Washington, DC! The show will be 3 hours earlier than usual, at 10:00 AM EST (1500 UTC). Then, remember that Daylight Savings Time begins on Sunday, March 14, so starting on March 20 we will be an hour earlier at 1:00 PM EDT (1700 UTC). Just keep an eye on our home page and you’ll be all right.

Episode Duration: 1:25:36
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

The focus of this week’s episode was the new blog post from the Development Team offering new details of where the Development Team will be headed after 3.0.7 has been released. Included in the lengthy discussion is looking at phpBB’s forthcoming move from Subversion to Git, potential new features and a 5/31 feature freeze date for phpBB 3.1 “Ascraeus,” and the decision to utilize Symfony 2 as the underlying framework for phpBB4 “Rhea.”

Of course this isn’t the only topic of the show, as we briefly take a look at OSCON getting its own domain, revised “Monumental” Meetup plans, and the latest on the development of 3.0.7 (RC-2 was released to the QA Team today).

And of course, be sure to tune in to hear Douglas attempt to impersonate Larry the Cable Guy and David attempt to swallow his computer keyboard. No, not kidding about that second one.

The MOD of the Week is Share Topic by Senky, and the Style of the Week is KS_Serious by KaneSP.

Episode Duration: 1:05:11
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman`), Michael Williams (mtotheikle), and Jeff Behnke (topdown)

It’s Douglas’ first week away from phpBB Weekly in many months–since last summer, in fact. And that’s when David loses some of his senses by allowing the other guys from StarTrekGuide to come on the show, to the point where they end up taking over. Why is that a problem? Because they have no standards, and start discussing topics that we wouldn’t dare to mention on the show typically. Specifically: global warming, religion, politics, the best web browsers, the fastest-growing chicken trade in China, and how to suck a hard-boiled egg into a beer bottle.

But once those are out of the way, they unveil details on the soon-to-be-released Whizby CMS project, a new CMS being developed by the STG folks that is based on the core code and APIs of phpBB. Then David responds to this topic by discussing a bit about what motivates a developer to take on a MOD, and why users who request free MODs can’t always expect Santa to deliver them exactly what they want.

The MOD of the Week is Post Expire by crazygandalf, and the Style of the Week is Beach by jrolson.

Episode Duration: 1:10:25
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

If you thought we spent a lot of time talking about the weather on phpBB Weekly, this episode will prove you right and then some. On this episode, Douglas comes on in the middle of Washington, DC’s historic blizzard of 2010, dubbed by the locals as either the “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon.”

But after spending the first 10 minutes ranting about this record-breaking storm, we take a look at the first release candidate of phpBB 3.0.7 which was seeded to the QA Team this past week. David dubs it the “fix the RSS/ATOM feeds release,” but there are a number of other fixes implemented towards the new features that came with 3.0.6.

We also mention the change in MOD Team leadership that occurred this week, saying goodbye to Igor Wiedler (eviL<3) who is stepping down from his role as MOD Team Leader, and welcoming back Eric Faerber (wGEric) who is returning to the role.

David then leads another discussion on Search Engine Optimization for phpBB3, inspired by a phpBB.com discussion topic inquiring what the best methods are available for board admins. He also recommends this post on Dave Rathbun’s phpBB Doctor blog to find out more about what SEO is, and isn’t.

The MOD of the Week is disable warning administrators and moderators by t_backoff, and the Style of the Week is achik by napy8gen.

Finally, our easter egg bonus at the end of the episode is of the Greatest Snow Forecast Ever — enjoy!

Episode Duration: 1:07:18
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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. I promise that we will get our act together starting next week. Apologies for the inconvenience.

This week’s focus was on phpBB community outreach. The teams announced their official presence at OSCON 2010, which will also be supplemented by the OSCONvasion 2010 meetup being organized by phpBB Weekly, which we delve into some details about various early ideas and plans. We take a look at phpbb.de’s planned meetup in Stuttgart, Germany, and Douglas also pulls the wraps off of the finalized plans for his phpBB “Monumental” Meetup in Washington, DC, happening on Saturday, March 13. Finally, Douglas previews his plans for BBvasion, an upcoming new website aimed at providing resources to encourage people to organize phpBB community-based events and user groups.

The MOD of the Week is Topics Descriptions by 00mohgta7, and the Style of the Week is Hestia Purple by stsoftware.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Episode Duration: 1:16:46
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and for SCOFF News: Handyman, Al Falfa, Marv Ellis, and Benji the Horse

Happy New Year, Happy New Decade, and Happy New Everything Else! It’s phpBB Weekly’s third anniversary and the start of our fourth season of episodes. We kicked off the year with the news that we have more Chinese downloads than any other country–who knew? (Although for our Chinese listeners, the “Happy New Year” ovations are still about a month and a half early.)

On this episode, we take a look at the MODX Generator, a new MOD Team tool that runs in the command line generates MODX installation scripts based on doing a diff between two different versions of phpBB installations. Then we share ideas and experiences on good and bad methods to promote a new community, borrowing lots of ideas from Patrick O’Keefe’s awesome book, Managing Online Forums. And finally, a new SCOFF News episode is out, and we play the then-world premiere of the new news report, featuring a brand new correspondent to the SCOFF team!

Our Discussion Question of the Week asks you to share your suggestions and experiences on promoting a community. This new segment of our show will introduce a new discussion topic on our forum every week, and on the following episode, we’ll feature some of the most interesting responses on the show.
The MOD of the Week is BBcode Buttons for 3.0.6 Quick Reply by SyntaxError90, and the Style of the Week is Frozen Phoenix by Mighty Gorgon.

Join us on Saturday when we will interview guests Russ Jackson and Paul Lush of StopForumSpam.com!