phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:29:28
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

On this non-live “Anything Goes” episode, Douglas is joined by the “Spokane Clan”–David Lewis, Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle). They’re all from Spokane, all bigwigs on StarTrekGuide, and are all celebrating the retirement of phpBB2 while Douglas continues mourning it.

The main topic of conversation is the recent blog post on session integration and other ways of integrating phpBB with your website. While we (and by we, we mean David) have discussed this before, we go significantly in-depth on the subject in this episode, including integrating the sessions, auths, templates, languages, DBAL–essentially the entire framework of phpBB in order to allow your website to seamlessly integrate with phpBB. WARNING: This is one of our much more technical topics and likely not intended for the faint-hearted. Most of the things we discussed can be found as articles on the phpBB Development Wiki.

Douglas was also on WordPress Weekly the other day, and one of the topics of conversation included bridges between phpBB and other platforms (such as Joomla!, WordPress, etc.). We extend that conversation on bridges a bit as well, and we’ll go a bit more in-depth on a number of bridge solutions that have popped up during the year 2008 on upcoming episodes of phpBB Weekly.

Finally, an interesting topic on phpBB.com’s General Discussion forum asked Is there a Government Plan to Close Down the Internet? We discuss the merits of this conspiracy theory but also chat a bit about the deeper serious issue of Net Neutrality. If you want to learn more about Net Neutrality and what you can do to protect it, visit SaveTheInternet.com.

Last week’s Poll Question of the Week was “What do you think of phpBB Weekly’s new website?” There were 11 votes (78.57%) saying “Wow, it’s awesome!”; 2 votes (14.29%) saying “Not as good as it was before.”; and 1 vote (7.14%) with No Opinion. This week’s poll question is “Do YOU think there’s a government plan to close down the internet?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on January 24th.

The MOD of the Week is Print a Post Mod by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is Glass Softblue (and other color choices as well) by DoubleJ.

Credit for our fake sponsor of the week goes to A Prairie Home Companion – Garrison Keillor.

As a reminder, phpBB Weekly will not be live on January 17th, but will return live during our usual timeslot on January 24th.

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Download MP3 Episode (42.9 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:14:56
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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Man, it seems like we can’t seem to get our episodes recorded weekly, doesn’t it? Well, hopefully we’ll start to turn that bad habit around, starting with this episode.

We start on this episode with an update from our President Bertie Election Contest, in which two candidates, Lyndon Bertie Johnson and Sir Bertie Jr., have qualified for the ballot. The two-week campaign season has now begun, and the fun is happening now in the forum!

Speaking of new forums, the teams announced earlier this week the launch of a new Events and Meetings forum for people to organize local phpBB events and meetups around their locality.

Finally, for the main portion of our show, we turn to a blog post made this week by Support Team member iWisdom on handling support requests. We talk a bit about how Support Team members and community supporters go through the Support Forum to help users out with phpBB, discuss some of the more common support requests, and finally offer our tips for interested users who want to start contributing in the support forum.

The MOD of the Week is Topic Solved by tumba25, and the Style of the Week is Jedi Knights by Scott Stubblefield.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts. Also, be sure to check out and vote in the 2008 People’s Choice Podcast Awards; voting begins on Thursday!

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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: 58:47
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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We actually had the chance to carve out a shorter episode of phpBB Weekly today, thanks to the fact that the recent surge in phpBB news has finally started to calm down. We took more of a MOD author’s/developers angle on this episode of phpBB Weekly.

For starters, MODX 1.2.1 is out. This update mostly consists of an updated XSL which brings a long some nice user interface enhancements, and gives Douglas the opportunity to rediscover how much better MODX has become since the last time he looked at it seriously a year or two ago. (We won’t rewrite the changes in MODX 1.2.1 here when you can see them by clicking on the link.) Plus, David also talks about the possibility of introducing new action tags into MODX in the future and asks for feedback from MOD Authors on what they would like to see. More about MODX is available at the MODX Resource Centre, and you can also see a sample of MODX 1.2.1.

Then, we go into-depth with the new phpBB Code Wiki, and discuss in-depth the purposes of the wiki, what kind of articles can be found on the wiki, and most importantly, how anyone can help contribute to the wiki to make it better. Our discussion is based on a blog post about the wiki that David posted last week.

The MOD of the Week is Upcoming Birthday List by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is RedSilver 3 by jozomannen.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the People’s Choice Podcast Awards. Nominations are now open (through the end of the day on September 30), so if you really like phpBB Weekly, consider nominating us!

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Download MP3 Episode (22.5 MB)

Episode Duration: 39:21
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

IMPORTANT! Contrary to what was said on this episode, we are still going to be doing our live episode streaming from Londonvasion as planned.

This episode, however, did not go according to plan, due to the fact that the team members had an important presentation to be at that conflicted with this live episode, and the London hotel that they were staying at had a miserably poor internet connection. (The hotel has promised that there will be a much, much better connection at Londonvasion, according to an e-mail David sent awhile after this episode ended.) So Douglas, left by himself, tried to fill for time by discussing some of the team member photos from Londonvasion and covering what will be discussed at Londonvasion based on the finalized schedule.

In addition, voting in the phpBBHacks.com Idol has begun, and Douglas explains how the voting will work and who is up against who. Go help determine who will win all of the fabulous prizes and their own library of books (not to mention the ever-important bragging rights)!

Finally, on the request of the ever-helpful chat room on TalkShoe, Douglas summarizes the latest MOD team post on the blog concerning MOD author feedback and how they handle it.

The MOD of the Week is Advanced Meta Tags by Drugs, and the Style of the Week is Getaway by CyberAlien.

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