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We thought that we would have a nice, short episode this week, but unfortunately, we love to digress so much that this episode ended up lasting a cool hour and a half! Nevertheless, we didn’t get as off-topic as we have tended to do during our past few not-live episodes, and for that, I guess we should be commended (?).

On this episode, we start by having David recap his experiences last weekend at Joomla!Day Vancouver (and the other sightseeing that he did in Vancouver in general). During the discussion, we end up covering things such as how the Joomla! folks had some interesting phpBB feature requests based on their unique point of view on how phpBB could be run, as well as some of the different ways that the Joomla! teams and community are organized, etc.

Afterwards, we take a look at the recently-released Londonvasion 2008 schedule, looking at each planned presentation and what will be talked about at the event. We do not know yet whether or not anything will be streamed from the event, nor do we know final details on what kind of coverage we’ll be doing from the event, since all that is still subject to change, but we’ll keep you posted.

Finally, Firefox 3 was released this past week, and so in honor of it, Douglas points out a Firefox Add-on for phpBB in addition to the MOD and Style of the Week: phpBB Canned Responses for Firefox 1.5-3.0 by Pumazooma (NOTE: this is still in beta!). In addition, as usual, the MOD of the Week is Automatic Daylight Savings Time (DST) for phpBB3 by MartectX, and the Style of the Week is RonPaul2008 for phpBB3 by blackraven007.

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On this episode, Patrick O’Keefe (owner of the iFroggy Network of blogs and communities) rejoins us on phpBB Weekly, this time to talk about his just-released brand new book, Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. After first talking with Patrick about how and why he wrote the book, we then go chapter by chapter, looking at the various points that he makes in his book and discussing them.

We do highly recommend this book (no, we’re not getting paid to say that) because it covers a lot of important things that prospective community admins should know that you won’t find in any user manual. If you want to find out more about why we’re so excited about this book, check out (no pun intended) this episode.

In addition, we wrap up our listener survey by doing our prize drawing! Winners have been notified by e-mail and should reply to the e-mail in order to receive their prize.

Related links for this episode:
Book Website
Book Press Release
ManagingCommunities.com Blog
CommunityAdmins.com Forums
Douglas’ Review of the Book

Example phpBB 1.4.x Website
eviL<3's MOD for Dealing with Ban Evaders (link coming once David uncovers it!)

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

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Today marks a very special milestone for phpBB Weekly (for any podcast, actually): our fiftieth episode! To celebrate, we bring you an interview that Douglas has been looking forward to for ten months. Patrick O’Keefe, the administrator of the iFroggy Network and phpBBHacks.com, joins us for a very interesting discussion.

During the interview, Patrick talks about phpBBHacks.com, including how and why it was started back in 2001 (yeah, it predates phpBB2!), and how it has grown and expanded in its seven year history. We also take an unbiased look at some of the differences between phpBBHacks.com and the phpBB.com MOD Database, and how phpBBHacks.com has become one of the most popular third-party phpBB sites on the internet (well, according to Google, anyway). He also talks a bit about his two websites for community administrators: ManagingCommunities.com (a blog) and CommunityAdmins.com (a community for communities). Finally, he tells us about his new book, Managing Online Forums, coming in late April. We will be reviewing his book on a future episode of phpBB Weekly, as well as giving away a copy! Stay tuned for more details on that.

David also answers a question in the TalkShoe chat room revealing that Ascraeus will feature the much-requested RSS Syndication feature built-in. We briefly talk about the significance of that feature addition.

And at the end of the show, David gives us his exclusive ski tips, based on the bloopers he endured earlier this week.

The MOD of the Week is SEO MOD for phpBB3 by Handyman`, and the Style of the Week is Macinscott 3 by Scott Stubblefield.

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

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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.

I’m excited to announce that the Submit Your Questions form is now back online after being down for a little while. It turned out that it was never broken, however it was being hammered by comment spammers to the point where Gmail was marking EVERY e-mail sent through there as spam, meaning it went straight to the spambox and not to my inbox, where I would never know that it existed. Essentially, I took it down for awhile to figure out what to do with the spam.

Thanks to my going to WordCamp this past weekend, I met Lorelle VanFossen, and a not-quite-so-recent entry on her blog mentioned that someone had written an integration of the Contact form plugin that I was using with Akismet. I’ve now installed it and re-enabled the form, and will try to check Gmail’s spambox frequently to make sure things aren’t going in there (hitting “Not Spam” a couple of times should do the trick!).

As a reminder, the Submit Your Questions form is intended for anyone who is unable to join in the chat room or call in live when we record the show on Saturdays; you can instead fill out the form with a question for us to answer on the air in a future episode. (Of course, it’s more fun for us if you call in live, but this makes a great alternative.) Just don’t ask us to come on your website to install something for you, we don’t make house calls.

Anyway, just wanted to pass along the word!