phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:13:18
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life), Jeff (JKThinking)

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On this episode, we’re joined by Jeff (JKThinking), co-host of the phpBBireland Podcast, which just launched back in March. Their podcast covers the phpBBireland website, the developers of the Stargate Portal for phpBB3 (no, it’s actually not an Irish phpBB support site). In addition to learning a bit more about the phpBBireland podcast, we also chat with Jeff about the Stargate Portal and have a good discussion about the purpose of portals for phpBB and when they are and are not useful for discussion forums.

Afterwards, David talks a bit about Bertie’s sojourn to Berlin at the LinuxTag Convention. Next week, David will chat with the phpBB team members who were at LinuxTag.

The MOD of the Week is FAQ Manager for phpBB3 by EXreaction, and the Style of the Week is SkyBlue for phpBB3 by Alex.

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: 1:16:54
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

This special episode of phpBB Weekly was recorded off of TalkShoe because we were unable to be available for a live show on Saturday, March 15th. Instead, utilizing our favorite utility, Skype, we recorded this special non-live episode where we broke with tradition and had a non-binding, somewhat hilarious discussion about the various issues and non-issues for phpBB.

During the episode, we discuss the recent appearance of a “code sniffer” in the phpBB3 Subversion. However, David has no idea what it’s about either (at this point), and so we mostly end up speculating. We also talk about phpBB’s new QA Team–it’s supposed to stand for “Quality Assurance Team,” but we inadvertently come up with a wacky new name that you’ll just have to find out for yourself.

In addition, we talk and joke a bit about such topics as phpBB’s impact on global warming, and phpBB’s plans for World Domination. Douglas also introduces his roommate to Bertie, and then talks about what “features” should be included in phpBB 3.2, and David argues why they shouldn’t be there.

All in all, this episode was mostly an opportunity for us to take a break from the normal drawl of what we normally do on phpBB Weekly and have a bit of fun while breaking some of the rules. We hope that you enjoy it, and we’ll be back to our usual professional selves next week. Incidentally, please also don’t forget about completing our listener survey while you’re here.

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: 41:11
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

We return from our two week vacation from TalkShoe to bring you an episode chalk full of announcements. First off, our own David Lewis is now on the MOD Team: Douglas leads the congratulations and also talks a bit about what it will mean for the show. It’s official: phpBB won the Sourceforge Community Choice Award for Best Project for Communications, beating out YaBB, Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim), and many other projects. This means that Bertie has a new Thingamagoop to play with and phpBB has major boasting rights for the next year. David and Douglas talk a bit about the other winning projects, the awards ceremony in Oregon, and thank the phpBB community for coming together to vote for phpBB. It’s also someone’s birthday today, and we report that the version number of the phpBB3 CVS has been upped from 3.0.RC4-dev to 3.0.RC4. Sure enough, less than half an hour after this show ends, phpBB3 Release Candidate 4 is released.

David couldn’t stay very long due to his job calling him away to Dallas, Texas without warning this weekend, so his planned segment on phpBB3 modules will be postponed until a few weeks off. However, Douglas talks a bit about the MOD Team’s release of MODX 1.0.1 this week, covering what’s new, and then sharing some of his opinions of MODX and where the MOD Team should focus to improve the accessibility of MODX.

The MOD of the Week is Guest See Only First Post by Wicher, and the Style of the Week is Glass by DoubleJ. If you’d like to point out a noteworthy MOD or Style for us to feature on the show, bookmark it on del.icio.us with the tag “phpbbwmod” or “phpbbwstyle” (without quotes), and we’ll see about mentioning it on a future episode!

Join us for phpBB Weekly #026 next week when Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), phpBB Support Team Leader, will be joining us as a guest host! More info can be found on the phpBB Weekly homepage.

Well, it was announced this morning that the other shoe dropped. The other phpBB Project Manager Jonathan “SHS`” Stanley, who was originally the Moderator Team Leader and in late 2005 promoted to his current position, has today stepped down. Although theFinn was the one who got phpBB started, Jon was the one who really kept the behind the scenes of phpBB strong. Every time the website or server needed to be rebuilt, SHS` was the one working on it, and he wouldn’t stop until it was done. (dhn mentioned how he spent 14 hour days during the March 2007 server outage.) I’ve seen him on IRC sometimes when he hadn’t slept for 50 hours because of working on the servers! I have no idea how he could do that.

All of the advertising on the site has been made possible by him. Many of the language packs and corrections in phpBB3 have been made possible by him. If it wasn’t for him, Bertie Bear wouldn’t exist (which depending on some people’s opinion may be a good thing or bad thing). And I’ll never forget this little morsel. And, as dhn said, SHS` was responsible for some other plans that we’ll hear about soon…

So goodbye SHS`, and thanks for all you’ve done for phpBB. You really are deserving of that custom rank which says “Kidnapped by Bertie!”

But now, with both of the Project Managers disappearing in the timespan of a month, I’m sure that there might be some people wondering if phpBB is coming to an end. The answer: absolutely not. Don’t compare this to captians leaving a sinking ship because the ship is not sinking. phpBB is an all-volunteer project, and in the case of SHS`, he’s been spending more time on phpBB than a full-time job would require.

phpBB still has 42 energized and excellent team members behind it. The only difference will be in the leadership: all of the decisions on which direction to take phpBB will be made collectively by the 7 team leaders. phpBB is still running strong, and will continue to run strong through the final release of phpBB3 and beyond.

Also, dhn hinted that an announcement saying “A return” would be coming in the next few days, which means that somebody might be coming back. As for who it is, I’m actually placing my bets on psoTFX…

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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!