phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:21:43
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Cullen Walsh (Brainy), and Samuel Thompson (SyntaxError90)

We hit this episode of phpBB Weekly coming right off of the excitement from OSCONvasion (all except Micheal, who couldn’t make it). Despite the fact that it was just a small meetup, most of which was spent touring the OSCON Expo Hall and downtown San Jose, it was still a lot of fun, with a lot of good discussions that took place. And it does go down as the first-ever phpBB meetup event in North America, after all. Douglas, Cullen, and Sam (who were all there) spent the first half hour of this episode recapping the various things we did and discussed at OSCONvasion. Be sure to follow the OSCONvasion tag on Flickr to see some of the great pictures we took around OSCON. And of course, audio from our live session is on phpBB Weekly #115, and video will be posted this week by AdamR.

It was announced just a few hours before this show that UMIL 1.0.0 Gold was released. The Unified MODs Install Library (UMIL) truly is the missing tool to allow actions like making database table changes, adding permissions, config options, or modules to be done automatically, and now that it’s fully stable, MOD authors and MOD installers can take full advantage of it.

Finally, the MOD Team has announced a Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition. This contest, which will help make a broad and diverse number of CAPTCHA plugins available for download and install at the launch of phpBB 3.0.6, offers free phpBB3 Berties to the best CAPTCHA plugins developed by MOD authors and submitted beginning in late August. The first submitted CAPTCHA plugin to be approved to the MOD Database will automatically receive a Bertie, plus a Bertie will be awarded to the team’s favorite CAPTCHA plugin and another to the favorite CAPTCHA plugin voted on by the community-at-large. We also take a look at the recently-revealed details of the default CAPTCHA plugins coming in 3.0.6, and go over what you need to know to build your own CAPTCHA plugin.

Our next phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “What would be the coolest CAPTCHA plugin to have installed on your board?” Vote in the poll on the sidebar at right; the poll ends on August 8th.

The MOD of the Week is Show First Post Only to Guest by Primy, and the Style of the Week is jblue by jbones.

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Episode Duration: 1:32:27
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), Erik Frerejean (erikfrerejean), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman)

Just because we’re all busy for the 4th of July holiday, doesn’t mean we can’t warm it up with a bang the night before! We got as big of a crowd together as we could for this fire-crackling episode of phpBB Weekly–which wasn’t live, allowing us to pull off a few stunts.

We start by taking another look at the Support Toolkit which hit its first release candidate a little over a week ago. Erik, who helped build the Support Toolkit, gave us a nice rundown of what the Toolkit does and what it’s goals are. Phil also wanted us to give some love (which Douglas took a little literally) to his Support Request Template Generator, which makes it quite a bit easier to submit a support request following the template. If you haven’t heard, it’s a good idea to use the Support Request Template.

David gives us a sneak preview of the Coffee Maker MOD that he’s planning for phpBB 3.2, which will require the USBWine attachment. Whether it’s USBWine or BBCoffee, Douglas probably won’t be satisfied until he can get root beer through a spout over the internet.

[20:44:03] * DavidIQ gags FountainOfApples
[20:44:30] <FountainOfApples> with the phpBB coffee, right?
[20:44:36] <FountainOfApples> that stuff is the worst brew ever
[20:44:42] <FountainOfApples>
[20:46:13] <DavidIQ> well that was while Highway|Away was doing it…American coffee is just blah

The blog post CAPTCHA Plugins and You discusses the new CAPTCHA plugins architecture coming in phpBB 3.0.6, and we look at the announcement in-depth, including what it will mean for style authors, MOD authors, and end users (after some transition, pure spambot-free heaven).

Finally, Douglas talks about a new book he’s been reading, Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. He talks about his experiences and thoughts after converting one of his projects over to OOP mode, and David and Francis promptly scare him again with more technical talk, but overall, we do have a bit of an interesting discussion about the merits of OOP vs. procedural programming. Finally, we all take our best crack and pronouncing Paamayim Nekudotayim, the true name of PHP’s scope resolution operator, and a fancy Hebrew name for “double colon” (::). As if programmers weren’t busy enough.
Overall, Douglas says that he did learn a bit from the book and that it helped make OOP more approachable, but he noted that really only the first two or three chapters are applicable to beginners, and criticized it for breezing through more complex code examples without much explanation, and for an obvious lack of proofreading.

There was no MOD or Style of the Week this week. Credits for this week’s musical escapades go to God Bless the USA – The Hit Crew and Stand Up Comedy – U2. Be sure to join us next Saturday, when we return live to the TalkShoe airwaves!

[20:58:41] <leviatan21> I think all of you are insane !!!
[21:02:25] <DavidIQ> that’s a requirement to be a coder

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Episode Duration: 1:41:13
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s just like old times on this episode of phpBB Weekly! Douglas and David are solo-hosting the show, David makes up a fake name for himself at the start of the show, and the episode lasts forever.

But on the contrary side of things, the main focus of this episode is an unprecedented announcement from the Development Team describing new features coming in phpBB 3.0.6, a “maintenance/bugfix release,” for Pete’s sake! We thoroughly analyze each of the announced new features and discuss what they’ll do, why they will be added, and what the effects will be for MOD authors in particular.

The new features include a new CAPTCHA plugins architecture, ATOM (RSS) feeds, support for four new cache/ACM plugins (and a no-cache option), exempting group leader permissions for groups, group management changes for the post queue and other permissions, separation/clarification of the Reply/Reply to All functions for private messages, pagination for smilies and icons, the ability to search logs, and other tiny features and bugfixes. And quick reply. Yes, Q U I C K R E P L Y, as Meik posted, representing a significant about-face from the phpBB teams which have traditionally been firmly against the inclusion of a quick reply feature since who knows when, and Douglas and David spend a bit of time talking about the significance of this quick reply concession and why we think it’s a good thing.

Then, Douglas formally announces the full details of the OSCONvasion 2009 meetup he is organizing, happening in San Jose, California in late-July. If you’re going to be in the Bay Area or are planning to come to OSCON, we hope you can make it!

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll question was “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” The top response was Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) with a whopping 13 votes (65%), followed by “The guy who made the front fall off” with 5 votes (25%), in closing up with Steve Wozniak and “The father of the internet” each receiving 1 vote (5%). President Barack Obama received 0 votes.
Our next phpBB Weekly Poll will be “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” The poll runs until Saturday, June 27th; vote in the right-hand sidebar on our site.

No MOD or Style of the Week this week. The episode’s closing music is Do You Know the Way to San Jose – Dionne Warwick, and the quick reply clip comes from the Discussion Panel at Londonvasion, and was also heard on phpBB Weekly #072.

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Episode Duration: 1:03:39
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), with a brief cameo from David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s a developer’s paradise on this episode of phpBB Weekly. phpBB 3.0.5 has been released, the “quite furry” edition, and the first phpBB release since late last year. With a slew of bugfixes, changes, and new features, headlining the bunch is a new CAPTCHA “wave” setting (to help improve over the cracked CAPTCHA from four months ago) and the long-awaited ability for users to refresh the displayed CAPTCHA. Improvements have now been made to the auto-updater as well, so if you haven’t gotten into the habit of using the auto-updater, now is a good time, as Phil explains.

But we’re already looking ahead to 3.0.6, as the Development Team has been busy pouring checkins to Subversion with some new backports from the Ascraeus branch. Included in there is a whole new “plugin” system for the CAPTCHA/Visual Confirmation which should make it easier for third-party CAPTCHAs to be incorporated to phpBB, although it will mean that authors of existing CAPTCHA MODs may have to do some rewriting pretty soon. Also backported is support for software-based caching engines such as XCache and eAccelerator, which should produce better (and somewhat more secure) results than phpBB’s current op-cache based system. (At least, that’s my understanding of it–Phil gives a better explanation of it on the show, and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I got it wrong.)

Finally, the Development Team offers up another relic in the form of the phpBB Code Swarm video, and Douglas performs his uniquely epic take on the video, live on the show (as in NOT pre-recorded and NOT practiced at all). For those of you who are wanting to share it, it starts at the 37:30 timestamp.

Oh, and the Development Team is moving up in the world! TerraFrost, an acquisition from the MOD Team, has been promoted from Junior Developer to full-fledged Developer, and bantu (also from the MOD Team) is now a Junior Developer. Congrats, folks! Not to be outdone (or deprived of all of their members), the MOD Team has some new Junior Validators: Balint, CoC, daroPL, and platinum_2007.

The MOD of the Week is Quote User Back Link by Erik Frerejean, and the Style of the Week is aktif by napy8gen.

Finally, the bonus at the end of the show is the William Tell Overture by Spike Jones (Douglas’ inspiration for his code swarm video interpretation).

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Episode Duration: 1:07:11
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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Emerging from the serious tone of last week’s episode, we decided to have a little bit more fun this week in light of it being Valentine’s Day. (Or, as Techie-Micheal frequently reminds us, Singles Awareness Day.) And so in honor of SAD, we led the show off with Always the Bridesmaid (Never the Bride) by Michael Weston King.

However, the phpBB news continues, and on Tuesday, phpBB.com made its triumphant return. It’s currently residing on a temporary server at OSUOSL while the main phpBB.com server continues to be investigated. Of course, PHPList is no longer being used on phpBB.com, and it’s so far not fully clear what will replace phpBB’s mailing list or how much differently the teams will address the use of third-party software on their site.

Lost amidst the downtime was the fact that on February 1, support for security patches for phpBB2 officially ended, and as a result, so did all support for phpBB2 MODding. All of those fora have been condensed into a phpBB2 Forum Archive. The styles fora continue to be open until May 1, when it is believed that all phpBB2 information on phpBB.com will be hidden from public view. Of course, we will continue to keep an eye on the continuing phpBB2 retirement process over the coming weeks.

And finally, we continue our coverage of the cracked phpBB 3.0.4 CAPTCHA by taking a look at some of the other new settings that have currently been added to the CAPTCHA in phpBB 3.0.5-dev. However, since it’s likely that most people will not want to take the time to check out a copy of the new CAPTCHA in Subversion, David put together a list of anti-spam MODs that offer a number of different tactics to help prevent automated spambots from reaching your board, and we provide an overview of what each of these MODs do and which ones may be appropriate for your boards. Given how many spambots David dealt with on STG, he’s also been installing some of these MODs for himself as well.

Our last Poll Question of the Week was “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?” There were 10 votes (58.82%) for “A community bulletin board, powered by phpBB.”; 3 votes (17.65%) for “The ability to comment on that new blog of theirs.”; 2 votes (11.76%) for “A slideshow of presidential pets.”; 1 vote (5.88%) for “Twitter. Need I say more?”; and 1 vote (5.88%) for “Assurances that the new government is NOT putting secret spyware on my computer that is tracing every move I make…”. This week’s poll is “What’s the best Valentine to give to a forum moderator?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on February 21st.

The MOD of the Week (although not really a MOD) is phpBB3 Website Integration Framework by Highway of Life, and David talked a bit about how you can use it to utilize the phpBB framework (sessions, auth, DBAL, request_var, etc.) for your website. The Style of the Week is WintersDay by BillStur Styles.