phpBB Weekly

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We had a lot of things to be happy about on this episode of phpBB Weekly: not only was there a large amount of news for us to cover, but it was the one-year anniversary of the release of phpBB 3.0.0 Gold, which put us in an excited mood (enough to make a few people in the chat room question us about whether or not we were sober).

In a somewhat surprising move, phpBB 3.0.4 was released on Friday, exactly one month after the release of 3.0.3, marking a major shift change as the Development Team begins focusing on making subsequent revisions of phpBB3 less, um, “huge” than 3.0.3 was. We cover the fixes, changes, and the one new feature in-depth, as usual.

David gives a grand welcome to this week’s new team members: two more Support Team members, and one new MOD Team member who was promoted from the Junior Validators Team. David also gives us a bit of an update on how the Junior Validators have been doing and a glimpse of where the idea will be heading.

Earlier this week, Meik (AcydBurn) that PHP 5.2.7 posed a security risk for phpBB2, due to an issue that PHP 5.2.7 caused with “magic_quotes_gpc.” We take a look at this risk in more detail, including why this affected phpBB2 but not phpBB3, and we also discuss why PHP 5.2.7 was retracted in the first place.

Finally, voting in the phpBBHacks.com 2008 Awards is almost over, so we take a look at the MODs/hacks, styles/templates, phpBB boards, and their authors up for the award.

The MOD of the Week is Annual Stars by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is MG Xmas by Mighty Gorgon.

In honor of one of David’s favorite songs (as we discovered midway through this episode), the closing music is Black Horse and the Cherry Tree — KT Tunstall.

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April Fools Day brings the announcement that Bertie has conquered Olympus on Mars! A very cute photo, in Douglas’ opinion. The prosilver theme has been uploaded to CVS, and Douglas highlights the major changes between the to-be-released prosilver and the phpBB.com prosilver. However, along with the prosilver theme comes a new backend theme to the admin panel which is kind of dark, with a lot of grey, and Douglas doesn’t really like it.

Because of prosilver, a number of users are asking for a beta6 release. Douglas reviews their arguments, and the possible pros and cons of releasing beta6 or going straight to an RC-1 release.

Last Wednesday, April 4th was the 5th anniversary of the release of phpBB 2.0.0!

The MOD of the Week is the Simple Subforums MOD by pentapenguin, which is a very simple way for adding subforums to phpBB2 assuming you don’t have to go more than one level down (which most boards shouldn’t have a problem with).

The Style of the Week is the Macinscott 2 theme by Scott Stubblefield (view demo), a really nice theme that does a great job of emulating Mac OS X. A must-have for Mac forums!

Finally, Douglas introduces and covers all the features of the new phpBB Weekly website.

Correction: During the episode I indicated that there was some limited use of AJAX in the ACP. While the ACP does make use of some Javascript, it is not AJAX. AJAX is a much more complex technology which is not utilized in phpBB3. (It is undecided whether AJAX will be used in future versions of phpBB.) Thanks to lachlan for pointing this out!