phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:28:07
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

Okay, maybe the title of this episode overstates it just a little bit, but there’s no doubt that this past week’s announcement of some major phpBB development changes has significant and far-reaching impacts to the phpBB community, which will significantly affect how future phpBB releases are managed and supported. Most importantly, these changes help to clarify the groundwork for Ascraeus (which will now be phpBB 3.1, not 3.2), subsequent releases after Ascraeus, and the eventual phpBB4 coming a few years down the road. Probably most significant, the new roadmap will allow new features (that don’t require a significant rewrite of the phpBB core code) to be brought in to phpBB 3.x sooner than has been the habit with prior releases of phpBB.

On this episode, we go into very hefty detail about both the short-term and long-term impacts of these changes to phpBB’s release strategy, and of course, we’ll be keeping a very close eye going forward as these changes start to become implemented with future phpBB releases.

We also spent a bit of time discussing the fun that took place at the recent phpBB Developer Meeting in Cologne, Germany. Not only is it clear that Bertie had a good time, but a lot of discussion took place, some decisions were made (with the aforementioned development changes likely being one of them), and some touring of the city also took place. We also discussed a bit about the next official phpBB event, which will likely be held in New York City sometime in 2010 (“Libertyvasion”), though obviously it may be a few more months before details come out from the teams.

Finally, we briefly covered a few highlights from some recent commits to the Subversion repository for 3.0.6 (subscribe to the SVN mailing list). There are even more new features coming in 3.0.6 now, such as the ability to report private messages and the ability for a moderator to delete all unread private messages in a user’s outbox (anti-spam measure).

The MOD of the Week is Static Pages by ameeck, and the Style of the Week is Quilting ‘n’ Sewing by billstur.

Be to join us on next week’s episode, when Tom Beddard (subBlue) will join us as our special guest!

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Episode Duration: 1:08:20
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal)

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We have done it! Our one-hundredth episode of phpBB Weekly, a significant milestone for any podcast. There may be tens or hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there, but only some of them make it to this milestone, particularly for a podcast that we never thought would make it this far ourselves.

Unfortunately, despite the high demand from our listeners, we were unable to book a guest to join us on this episode. But we had someone almost as good! Our new temporary co-host, Micheal Cottingham, joined us in his new role for this first time on this show, and Douglas and he chatted a bit about security. We discuss a number of the topics from the StarTrekGuide Security Class forum (including an important one for EVERYONE to read about protecting your passwords), and we also go over some common injection vulnerabilities that MOD authors and all PHP developers need to keep an eye out for. And if you think you know all of the injections by heart, why not try the “Find the Injection” games over on the Security Class forum?

We also take a look at a recent blog post about Area51 (the phpBB development site, not the secret military base) and discuss a bit about its past role during Olympus development and its likely role during Ascraeus development.

Our last poll question was “What’s your favorite web browser?” There were 6 votes (55%) for “Firefox!”, 3 votes (27%) for “Safari!”, 1 vote (9%) for “Internet Explorer,” and 1 vote (9%) for “I seem to have an inability to pick a web browser and stick with it.” This week’s poll will be “What’s the best April Fool’s prank to pull on your users?” The poll will open up later this week and run until March 28; plus there will be an “Other” option for you to submit your own suggestions!

The MOD of the Week is User Reminder by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is AutumnsColor by BillStur Styles.

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Episode Duration: 1:18:23
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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News from the phpBB front has been somewhat limited recently, so we dug deep into our coffers to uncover some things to chat about on this “potpourri”-style episode.

David first brings up that phpBB.com has now been enhanced with some of the new features from the recently-released phpBB 3.0.3. New users on phpBB.com will now have their first post send to the moderation queue for approval, but once they have one approved post, they will then have free access to go on posting like normal. The teams are hoping that this will allow them to catch spammers more easily and ban them on sight. Speaking of banning, David also shares how much he loves the new one-click ban feature, making it possible for administrators to ban users straight from their profile.

David and Douglas than discuss a question which has been often brought up recently: “Will phpBB write/release a book?” Well, as is the case with most things from the teams, there’s no definite answer, but David and Douglas both have their own separate opinions on the subject, which they spend some time discussing.

Finally, David and Douglas talk a bit about the new request class that Nils Aderman (naderman) committed to the Ascraeus SVN repository last week, which brings a number of enhancements to phpBB3′s request_var() function, and what it means for MOD authors. They then step back and go over the importance of securing user-submitted variables in PHP in order to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities, which request_var() makes very simple for phpBB3 MOD authors. As Nils quoted in his commit log,

“Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.”

The MOD of the Week is Smilie Creator by Dr.Death, and the Style of the Week is proChristmas by topdown. If you have any suggestions for MODs or Styles to highlight on our show (particularly any holiday-themed styles), please share them with us!

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Episode Duration: 1:51:09
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Cullen (Brainy), and Francis Lewis (Handyman)

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This episode was actually recorded on Saturday, September 20, but between some busy circumstances and a weeklong outage with TalkShoe’s uploading form, it took two weeks to get this thing released!

Douglas was out and about during this episode of phpBB Weekly, so David decided (as usual) to invite a few other team members to come along for the ride. He was joined on this episode by Cullen (Brainy) of the Moderator Team, and Francis Lewis (Handyman) of the MOD Team, and they talked about a plethora of topics. They start by discussing a few things that moderators should know about the dangers of over-moderating: over-zealously deleting signatures or posts. They then discuss a bit more about CAPTCHAs, why the work and don’t work, and some ideas for alternatives for a CAPTCHA.

Then, remember back at Londonvasion, when Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) gave a presentation outlining the new features coming in phpBB 3.2 Ascraeus? He recently made a blog post explaining these features in more detail, and they cover this blog post in detail on this episode.

The MOD of the Week is Anti-Bot Question by CoC, and the Style of the Week is DarkFantasy by Daniel Exe.

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

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Episode Duration: 50:34
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Paul Sohier (Paul), Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic)

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Douglas was off taking a test during this episode, so he couldn’t make it, but then again, David forgot that it was Saturday, which is why the live stream of phpBB Weekly never happened! Whoops. Anyway, David managed to grab together a couple of team members to talk to for what could almost pass as another episode of the Official phpBB Podcast.

Anyway, this past week, the inevitable phpBB 3.0.1 was released featuring dozens of bugfixes, including two security-related fixes. As this marks the first non-RC-related update to phpBB3, they spend a little bit of time reviewing the process for updating from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 and the importance of keeping your boards up-to-date. In addition, they discuss other common support issues with upgrading and how upgrading relates to the importance of keeping core code changes in MODs down to a minimum for compatibility.

They then discuss the recent alpha release of a MOD by naderman (of the Development Team) of the Sphinx Search Plugin for phpBB. Sphinx is a free open-source SQL fulltext search engine that is now another option that you can use for indexing your board’s content on your search page, and will quite possibly be showing up in phpBB 3.2 “Ascraeus.”

Yuriy gives us a quick update on the latest Londonvasion details (and by the way, you should also check out phpBB Weekly’s latest Londonvasion plans), and David tells us about Star Trek Guide’s new MOD Manager, as well as how you can obtain the “Borg Invasion” style that was used for STG’s recent April Fools joke.

No MOD or Style of the Week was selected this week, but we promise that we will make up for lost time next week and get back into the MODs and Styles selections.

Technical Note: Apologies for the background sounds in this episode–David discovered after the fact that he forgot to turn off his Skype sound effects!

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