phpBB Weekly

It’s been about three and a half months now since phpBB3’s gold release rocked the galaxy, and so now the hype has simmered down and the devs have rested up and the first big wave of post-release bug reports have rolled in. So now, three and a half months after the release, the Development Team has been working hard on the inevitable 3.0.1 release.

Confirming what David has promised us for these past few months, the Dev Team will be quietly issuing “quality assurance” release candidates of every minor release in an effort to avoid repeating instances of having to issue a new release within days of a previous one (as happened twice in the 2.0.x line and once during phpBB3’s RC stage). Anyone can help themselves to these release candidates (and the QA “Quack and Assassinate” Team will be forced to dive through them), and they will likely materialize into a full version of phpBB 3.0.1 by the end of the week. There will be a mailing list to subscribe to if you want to help test out release candidates when they come out (they will not normally be published on the announcements forum to the general community). As a reminder, while the RCs are not fully complete, the chances are that they will fix more problems than they cause; the purpose of the QA testing is to ensure that they don’t introduce any significant new problems.

So far, the list of changes for 3.0.1 features fifty bugfixes–it’s obvious that the dev teams have been busy, in addition to their recent release of 2.0.23 plus working on the development of Ascraeus.

We have been planning something special for this Saturday’s episode of phpBB Weekly, and thus, we will not be able to discuss phpBB 3.0.1 on our show this week. However, this is just a note to you to keep an eye out for the new release and update! (You know, I hear that the new auto-updater is like super-easy and totally rocks!) If you’re interested in helping to test out the release candidates, feel free to help yourself.

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This episode did not go according to plan. We had expected to have phpBB Developer DavidMJ on as a guest today, but unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a family emergency and was unable to make it, so we ended up coming together with a pretty good show while we stalled and took comments from our live listeners (six of whom were phpBB team members!). This episode was recorded right before the release of phpBB3 RC-6 and the ensuing chaos that has followed the release, which you can read a bit about in the previous post on this blog, and which will be discussed more thoroughly on next week’s episode. We do hope to try to bring DavidMJ on sometime in November, with more details coming soon.

In this episode we talk a bit about the phpBB Security Team and Incident Investigation Team and about what those teams do, and also briefly discuss some common security vulnerabilities common in PHP code that both the developers and MOD authors need to look out for. We do a little bit more coverage of the just-about-to-be-released RC-6, and wander off for a few minutes into a discussion of Mac security vs. Windows security. (It’s not as bad as you might think.) Then, Jeffro calls in and asks us to talk a bit more about just how private private messaging is, and we also talk about changes in phpBB3 styles vs. phpBB2 styles and possible enhancements to phpBB MODding in the long-term future.

The MOD of the Week is Notify Admin on Registration for phpBB3 by ameeck, and the Style of the Week is Playstation for phpBB3 by Scott Stubblefield.

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