phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:14:52
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

This weekend, we mark phpBB Weekly’s second anniversary (that right, can you believe we’ve been doing this for two years now?) and the beginning of the year 2009. But that also brings with it some other news, which may or may not be disappointing depending on your point of view: phpBB2 has been officially retired and support for phpBB2 has ended. We take a look at the end of support announcement and look down the road and discuss how phpBB2 will be further phased out over the next few weeks and months. And Douglas is once again very disappointed about the news, while David tries to tell him to get over it.

However, if you didn’t already notice, we launched a new website for ourselves, and so we spend a bit of the beginning of the episode reviewing what has changed on our website and on our podcast, as well as providing a glimpse of some further changes that may be coming down the road.

The MOD Team continues to make waves with the announcement that the MPV (MOD pre-validator) source code has been released in the MODX Tools repository of the phpBB Code Forge, plus it can now run on any site without the need to have phpBB installed. We discuss the reasons for releasing the MPV source and David also attempts to describe some of the other tools under development in the MODX Tools repository. He couldn’t remember all of them, however, so we’ll probably make some corrections next week.

Finally, there will be a phpBB Meeting in Scotland, UK on Saturday, January 24th. We discuss a bit of the activities that will be happening there; we’re not sure yet if we’ll be doing anything special in connection with the meetup on the 24th or not, so stay tuned. Plus, Douglas has decided to do something about his own pipe dreams and has posted a topic looking for interest in a San Francisco phpBB conference/meetup this summer, and David and Douglas discuss some of the logistics of that, if it happens. Plus, Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic) also shares some perspective on both of these via the chat room.

The MOD of the Week is Prime Birthdate Require by primehalo, and the Style of the Week is Revolution by Semi_Deus. Also, our first-ever phpBB Weekly poll question for this week is “What do you think of the new phpBB Weekly website?” Vote in the poll on the right sidebar on our website, and we’ll evaluate the responses to the poll on our next episode.

2009 is here, and we’re ready for another great year of phpBB Weekly! Thanks for listening, as always.

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Download MP3 Episode (34.6 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:00:32
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

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We’re back from our vBulletin April Fools joke to throw a very full episode at you all as we catch up on the plethora of phpBB news that has been churning out over the past week or two.

We start off by briefly chatting with David about Star Trek Guide’s Deck 15 Stunt that they pulled for April Fools Day, including lobbying for him to release the code he used for Deck 15 as a MOD. Afterwards, we spend a little time talking about the upcoming phpBB 3.0.1 release (can you say “bugfixes,” anyone?), and discussing the beginning of the minor release candidates and the associated phpbb-qa mailing list.

We then turn to the 3.2 “Ascraeus” front and discuss some of the latest SVN checkins, including the beginnings of the new BBCode parser that Marek (APTX) checked in, and the new Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL) function that DavidMJ has committed, as well as the beginnings of a completely retooled posting API. We’ll be sharing more details about these new features soon once we learn more about them ourselves.

We take a bit of time to discuss once again the future of phpBB2, and how long it will last. NeoThermic calls in to offer some of his comments, and we spend some time discussing why some people would be in favor of killing phpBB2 and why others would be against it.

For the main part of the show, Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty) joins us to talk about Londonvasion 2008, the first major phpBB conference taking place all day in London on Sunday, July 20th, 2008. We chat with Yuriy about how Londonvasion came about and what will be taking place there, as well as beginning some initial discussions for how phpBB Weekly will plan to cover the event. If you have any suggestions for how you want us to cover this event, please see our Londonvasion Topic in the phpBB Weekly forum.

There was no MOD or Style of the Week this week since we were limited on time for this episode.

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