phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 37:47
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal)

On this shorter episode, we clean up from the deliciousness of last week and get back to “normal.” Douglas and Micheal take a look back at a number of the April Fool’s pranks from the previous week (see links below) from phpBB communities and other websites.

UMIL 1.0 RC-2 was recently released by the MOD Team, and we briefly recap UMIL and what it does, but don’t get into many details about the new RC without David’s expertise on the subject.

Finally, Micheal discusses a recurring issue of people claiming that phpBB3 has vulnerabilities and exploits that do not exist (like this recent example). We discuss a bit about the ramifications of these and the best way that phpBB, other security firms, and web hosts can respond to these. See also this phpBB.com blog post and this discussion topic.

April Fools Links Mentioned on the Show:
Community April Fools Jokes
Deck 15–DO NOT ENTER!
New Tech “Products” for April 1st
Google’s Gmail Autopilot
Woopra’s Webcam Enablement Feature
UC San Diego’s Acceptances April Fools

Our ongoing Poll Question of the Week is “What should be featured on the next episode of BBGourmet?” Vote in the poll on the sidebar to the right. Poll ends on Saturday, April 11.

The MOD of the Week is Save full drafts by asinshesq, and the Style of the Week is SpringFlowers by BillStur Styles.

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Episode Duration: 39:08
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

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It’s our annual pre-April Fools Day episode, but this time, we’re not doing another very bad impression of another bulletin board podcast. This time Douglas takes the podcast up to a new level: the height of cooking shows! Live on the air, Douglas prepares one of the biggest delicacies for any community: Community Chocolate Cake, with the taste of your community baked right in. You can check out the actual photos of the project, and view the full recipe after the jump.

Our last Poll Question of the Week was “What’s the best April Fools prank to pull on your users?” There were 3 votes (30%) for “Give them access to a fake version of the ACP (example),” 3 votes (30%) for “Announce that your community has been purchased by Microsoft (or some other arch enemy),” 2 votes (20%) for “Make them think they’ve been banned,” 0 votes for “Change the language on your entire board to something strange and obscure,” and 2 “other” votes which were “Put a giant slice of bacon over the index page (example)” and “BORG INVASION!”. This week’s poll question will be “What other recipe should be featured on the next edition of BBGourmet (if there ever is one)?” Vote in the poll on the right-hand sidebar on this website!

There is no MOD or Style of the Week this week. phpBB Weekly will return back to its normal self next week!
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Episode Duration: 47:32
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Despite us being somewhat early, this episode was our special for April Fools Day 2008: our best attempt to pretend to be a weekly live podcast all about vBulletin. We tried our best, but we couldn’t resist throwing in a few good doses of surprise and sarcasm.

On this episode of vBulletin Weekly, we look at the history of how vBulletin came to be and where it is today. For those of you who are new to vBulletin, we discuss the requirements of running vBulletin, the licensing fees (ever heard of those?) for vBulletin, and the long multi-step installation process. Plus, the first release candidate of the next major release of vBulletin, 3.7, just came out a week or two ago. We take a look at some of the wildly inventive new features coming in 3.7, as well as our opinions on them. Plus, we discuss a bit about the unique idea of “threads” that vBulletin offers, and answer some questions from our angry mob chat room about vBulletin.

Links mentioned in this episode:
vBulletin Info and History (Wikipedia)
vBulletin Community Forums
vBulletin Customizations Website
Comparison between phpBB and vBulletin
First Look at vBulletin 3.7

The Hack of the Week is the Post Thank You Hack for vB 3.6 by Abe1, and the Skin of the Week is Jedi Knights – Star wars for vB 3.6 by foruma-z.

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

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Episode Duration: 30:51
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

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!