phpBB Weekly

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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.

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Episode Duration: 1:00:17
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

This episode was supposed to be the first episode with David “Highway of Life” Lewis as our new co-host, but unfortunately, he couldn’t make it. It was still a full episode as Douglas tried to explain MODX without getting too technical or too boring. A big thanks goes out to the many who participated in the show and called in!

Hot off the presses, phpBB is a finalist for the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards for “Best Project for Communications”. It’s a high honor to be winner of this award, so go and vote for phpBB!

In this episode, Douglas gives a brief history of MODX, talks about its advantages and disadvantages, and also talks about the MODX Packaging Guidelines and Versioning System, as well as identifies some resources for MOD authors to use MODX. Many of these can be found at the MODX Resource Centre. It’s also encouraged that MOD authors verify that their MODX package is correct with the mEAL pre-validator tool. There were a few things that the MOD team had not made 100% clear at the recording of this episode. They will probably be submitting me corrections to mistakes that I may have made; these will be mentioned in the comments section of this post and at the beginning of the next show.

The MOD of the Week is Oops – Database Down by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Chairs Template by AngusThermopile.

Douglas will be away in Sacramento on the 14th and at the WordCamp conference on the 21st, so the next live episode will not be until Saturday, July 28th, at the usual time. If there is a big announcement/news from phpBB in the interim, we may release a special episode (not live) to talk about it. Think of this as like my “summer vacation”.

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Episode Duration: 49:44
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

In this episode, Highway of Life joins us to talk about his experience with phpBB3. He talks about how he built his Star Trek Guide Forums off of phpBB3 CVS (which is not recommended, by the way) , the differences between MODding for phpBB2 and phpBB3, and much more. We had an excellent interview on this episode which is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in learning more about what’s new in phpBB3, including MOD authors and people who are interested in building a real online community with phpBB3.

In addition, next week is the 2007 MOD Authors Convention in the #phpbb-mod IRC room on freenode.net. Douglas covers what the event will be like, how to participate, and we even come up with some questions to ask there. We will be covering the MOD Authors Convention next weekend on episode #022.

The MOD of the Week is Delete User MOD by ycl6, and the Style of the Week is ExtremeDark Red by GHS (view demo).

MOD Team leader wGEric announced today that the MOD Team will be holding an all-day, IRC MOD Authors Convention from 0000 UTC on June 30th till 0000 UTC on July 1st. They did something similar a year ago, except that this year, they actually are dividing the day into 2 hour blocks to talk about various subjects. A number of MOD Team members will be available at any moment of the day to discuss MODding with members of the community in IRC.

That day, as you know, is also going to be phpBB Weekly #022, starting at 1600 UTC, so what I want to know is should I do anything special in terms of covering the MOD Authors Convention on the podcast? Leave any suggestions or comments on this entry. (If the MOD team has any suggestions in terms of covering the Convention, they can also feel free to comment! I know that you listen to the show, guys.)

See you next Saturday in #phpbb-mod!