phpBB Weekly

Hello phpBB Weekly listeners,

Those of you who have seen our TalkShoe page recently have noticed that we have a very exciting month of May planned (as far as phpBB Weekly episodes are concerned), and so I thought I’d take the opportunity to sum up what’s on the agenda for the next few weeks.

First of all, as you’ve noticed, there will be no episode on Saturday, May 3rd. The reason for this is partially because Douglas is out of town, and also because he has been (and continues to be) busy prepping for AP exams at school, and this will neither give him the opportunity to be at an episode of phpBB Weekly nor to be able to edit it, so we’re just going to give him the week off. (Actually, he’s already out of town–this post was scheduled a week ago!)

Patrick O’Keefe (who was on episode #050 on February 9th) will be joining us again on May 10th for phpBB Weekly #061. His new book, Managing Online Forums, was recently released (Douglas just reviewed it on his blog, too), and so he will be joining David and Douglas to talk about his excellent new book in detail. Plus, we will be doing the prize giveaway for the listener survey that we launched back in March, so this will be an episode that you will want to be here for. (By the way, you still have time to fill out the listener survey–we’ve only gotten about 30 responses so far, so hie thee hence and add yourself to the lot!)

David will be doing another solo episode on May 17th (Douglas has to present a workshop that day) and so we will announce the topic of discussion at that time.

On May 24th (episode #063), we will be joined by Matt Mullenweg, the founder and “Chief BBQ Taste Tester” of Automattic, the people who produce the very popular WordPress blogging software, and also produce the up-and-coming bbPress forums software. We’ll break away from phpBB a bit on this episode to chat with Matt about bbPress and the very different philosophy that it utilizes for BB-based communities, as well as learn about some of the experiences that Automattic has had building WordPress and bbPress as open-source programs, comparing them a bit with phpBB’s open source life. It should be an interesting episode.

Finally, rounding out the month of May, we will be joined on episode #064 (May 31st) by the hosts of the recently-created phpBBIreland podcast. They’ll join us to talk a bit about their new show, as well as the phpBBIreland.com community and the Stargate Portal, a portal for phpBB3 that they develop.

Anyway, we’re certainly looking forward to some exciting episodes this month, and we hope that you’ll join us!

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Download MP3 Episode (50.3 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:27:53
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

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Well, the inevitable has happened: it was announced this past week that phpBB2 will be going end of life later this year. Although nothing is happening immediately, download links for phpBB2 will be removed in October, followed by support ending in January, and all security patches ending in February, at which point phpBB2 will be officially retired and the teams will focus exclusively on phpBB3 from here on out. Other teams have or are in the process of announcing their individual plans surrounding the retiring of phpBB2.

We are joined on this episode by Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), the Support Team Leader, and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), a Support Team Member, to talk about this announcement. They talk about the many reasons that led this announcement to be made, particularly this early, and why the teams have decided that this decision is for the best. We also discuss how users hearing about this can prepare for the change, as well as assessing opinions pulled from the discussion topic on phpBB.com and the discussion on Star Trek Guide.

Also, we look ahead to our giveaway drawing in three weeks, and share the finalized list of prizes that we’re giving away. Plus, we look at our latest Londonvasion plans.

The MOD of the Week is Users default avatar for phpBB2 by leviatan21, and the Style of the Week is TheEighties Template for phpBB2 by phpbbmodded.de.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

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Download MP3 Episode (25.5 MB)

Episode Duration: 44:38
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

On the heels of last week’s accident comes another episode of phpBB Weekly, once again featuring a solo act from Douglas. On this episode, Douglas once again begs for forgiveness for the accident that caused last week’s dilemma, but also takes a second look at what was discussed last week and re-examines (as well as clarifies) the various new features in phpBB 3.2 Ascraeus. At the same time, he examines the announcement that phpBB Development is moving to Subversion, and also makes mention of the new phpBB Code Forge.

This is a short and sweet episode that may sound like a regurgitation of what was covered last week, but we try to tackle it all in a new light as we collectively take a deep breath and move on.

The MOD of the Week is Change Poster for phpBB2 by Joe Belmaati, and the Style of the Week is Jenova Template for phpBB2 by varuna.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

Well, phpBBWeekly.net was gone for pretty much the full day. I must admit, the site redesign took longer than anticipated, and indeed, I spent the whole day working on this thing. Considering the size of my to-do list, you can imagine that I wasn’t too pleased either.

However, the new phpBB Weekly website is about 95% complete. You’ll notice that it looks pretty similar–we are still using the same theme as we did before. We are, however, going to be getting a brand new header image for the site which is being designed by my same friend who did our album artwork, and that will be added when he gets it finished sometime this weekend. This, along with a few other backend tweaks, are some things that are yet to be done and make up the remaining 5% of the work.

In my opinion, the redesigned site looks a lot better and is much better organized. Gone is the huge home page with enough text on it to make any newcomer scream out loud. The blog itself now constitutes the front page of our website, and that big, red, impossible-to-miss box at the top is where the preview of the next episode is posted. There’s also a much shorter summary of the podcast and this website on the sidebar, but all of the other information has been moved onto our newly consolidated About and Participate pages.

We are now fully integrating tags into the website and all of the posts. This means that if you are interested in a particular topic, you can go to our Tags page and see all of the topics that have been mentioned on our show and on our blog. We also have a new archives viewer on the site as well. All of the posts now come with a ShareThis button so that you can easily share them with a friend or on a social networking site, and all of the comments are now Gravatar enabled. A number of other smaller changes have also been made to bring the site up-to-date with how far our podcast has come since this site was first launched almost eight months ago.

We hope you enjoy the site, and we’ll probably be talking a bit more about what’s new on phpBB Weekly #040 tomorrow. And of course, keep an eye on our website as we finish up the last few features and get them deployed. See you tomorrow for phpBB Weekly!

Hello everyone,

We’re going to be doing some shuffling and reorganizing of the phpBB Weekly website this upcoming weekend. Although we won’t be bringing around any radically new designs or anything (and no, we do not plan to dress this website up in Christmas lights), we’re going to make some changes to improve the organization of our site and make it a bit more intuitive. phpBB Weekly has grown exponentially since I threw this site together almost eight months ago, and so hopefully the new site will provide us with more emphasis on what we want out of our website.

That said, we have scheduled downtime for this Friday, November 23rd, starting at approx. 11 AM Eastern time (1600 UTC), and will last for a few hours, depending on how long it takes for the technology gods to cooperate. In the meantime, you will still be able to access all of our phpBB Weekly episodes via our TalkShoe page. Or, since it’s the day after Thanksgiving anyway, you can probably find some “Black Friday” store sale somewhere or perhaps fatten yourself up on some of the Turkey Day leftovers in your fridge.

Anyway, have a good Thanksgiving Day, and we’ll see you on Saturday for our next phpBB Weekly!