phpBB Weekly

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News from the phpBB front has been somewhat limited recently, so we dug deep into our coffers to uncover some things to chat about on this “potpourri”-style episode.

David first brings up that phpBB.com has now been enhanced with some of the new features from the recently-released phpBB 3.0.3. New users on phpBB.com will now have their first post send to the moderation queue for approval, but once they have one approved post, they will then have free access to go on posting like normal. The teams are hoping that this will allow them to catch spammers more easily and ban them on sight. Speaking of banning, David also shares how much he loves the new one-click ban feature, making it possible for administrators to ban users straight from their profile.

David and Douglas than discuss a question which has been often brought up recently: “Will phpBB write/release a book?” Well, as is the case with most things from the teams, there’s no definite answer, but David and Douglas both have their own separate opinions on the subject, which they spend some time discussing.

Finally, David and Douglas talk a bit about the new request class that Nils Aderman (naderman) committed to the Ascraeus SVN repository last week, which brings a number of enhancements to phpBB3’s request_var() function, and what it means for MOD authors. They then step back and go over the importance of securing user-submitted variables in PHP in order to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities, which request_var() makes very simple for phpBB3 MOD authors. As Nils quoted in his commit log,

“Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.”

The MOD of the Week is Smilie Creator by Dr.Death, and the Style of the Week is proChristmas by topdown. If you have any suggestions for MODs or Styles to highlight on our show (particularly any holiday-themed styles), please share them with us!

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We actually had the chance to carve out a shorter episode of phpBB Weekly today, thanks to the fact that the recent surge in phpBB news has finally started to calm down. We took more of a MOD author’s/developers angle on this episode of phpBB Weekly.

For starters, MODX 1.2.1 is out. This update mostly consists of an updated XSL which brings a long some nice user interface enhancements, and gives Douglas the opportunity to rediscover how much better MODX has become since the last time he looked at it seriously a year or two ago. (We won’t rewrite the changes in MODX 1.2.1 here when you can see them by clicking on the link.) Plus, David also talks about the possibility of introducing new action tags into MODX in the future and asks for feedback from MOD Authors on what they would like to see. More about MODX is available at the MODX Resource Centre, and you can also see a sample of MODX 1.2.1.

Then, we go into-depth with the new phpBB Code Wiki, and discuss in-depth the purposes of the wiki, what kind of articles can be found on the wiki, and most importantly, how anyone can help contribute to the wiki to make it better. Our discussion is based on a blog post about the wiki that David posted last week.

The MOD of the Week is Upcoming Birthday List by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is RedSilver 3 by jozomannen.

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Also, be sure to check out the People’s Choice Podcast Awards. Nominations are now open (through the end of the day on September 30), so if you really like phpBB Weekly, consider nominating us!

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We return from our three week break energized and ready to go with our fall “season” of phpBB Weekly, and we kick it off with the realization that there’s a whole bunch of news for us to cover from just the past few days.

The MOD and Styles Databases have been upgraded with the ability to subscribe to individual MOD updates by e-mail (and, according to Paul, there’s a secret RSS feed as well). Speaking of the databases, thirteen phpBB3 styles have finally been approved for the Styles Database. In addition, the Styles Team has announced a new styles validation policy regarding how they will handle new releases of phpBB and how it will affect style validation. The Londonvasion videos are now available as well, and David shares some of his recommendations for the best ones to watch if you don’t have time for all of them.

The MOD Team will be holding its third annual MOD Authors Convention next Saturday, August 30 in the #phpbb-mod IRC channel. We briefly describe what sessions will be presented at the convention on this episode, and will be providing complete live coverage of the convention on next week’s episode. And finally, PHP 4.4.9 has been released, signifying the last release of PHP 4 as the PHP Group drops support for it, plus PHP 5.3 is in early release candidate stage, and we discuss some of the development team’s recent changes in the Subversion repository in response to the new version of PHP.

We then bring you a tutorial on the ways you can optimze search engine optimization (SEO) in phpBB3, from our local SEO expert, David Lewis, whose blog post on SEO and phpBB3 just appeared on the phpBB.com Blog.

Links from the SEO Tutorial and Other Recommended SEO Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
SEO MOD
Advanced Meta Tags MOD
What are Google Sitemaps?

This week’s MOD and Style of the Week are the winners of the recent phpBBHacks.com Idol (which means that these two authors won over $1200 worth of prizes for their products!). The winning hack/MOD is Log Connections by Elglobo and the winning style is Soul City by Abble CoSa NoStrA.

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Editor’s Note: Yes, we’re going a little out of order here, but between Douglas being in China and David being in Vancouver, we haven’t had the chance to catch up and get ahold of the recording of #065. We’ll try to have it out by the end of the week. Thank you for your patience.

This special episode of phpBB Weekly focused on discussion of phpBB’s relationship with Joomla! and how it has developed into the RokBridge integration between the two products. For the first half of the show, Douglas is joined by phpBB Developer Nils Adermann (naderman) who talks about how Joomla! and phpBB came together, how the relationship has grown and progressed, and about how the RokBridge project has developed and what it means for the future of both projects.

We also ran into some extra time, and took advantage of it to discuss the opening of the Styles Database, MODX 1.2.0, an early look at the upcoming 3.0.2 release, and some of the latest things checked into the Ascraeus SVN development.

Then, for the second half of the show, David joins us live from the Joomla!Day event in Vancouver during his lunch break, in which he talks a bit more about the phpBB-Joomla! relationship and about some of the things that have been taking place at the event. He also introduces us to Brad Baker, one of the Joomla! Core Team members. He’ll fully recap his experiences from the event on our next episode.

The MOD of the Week is Viewtopic Birthday for phpBB3 by eviL<3. There is no Style of the Week this week (because, as you hear on the show, the style databases that Douglas tried to connect to were down!).

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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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