phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:28:07
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

Okay, maybe the title of this episode overstates it just a little bit, but there’s no doubt that this past week’s announcement of some major phpBB development changes has significant and far-reaching impacts to the phpBB community, which will significantly affect how future phpBB releases are managed and supported. Most importantly, these changes help to clarify the groundwork for Ascraeus (which will now be phpBB 3.1, not 3.2), subsequent releases after Ascraeus, and the eventual phpBB4 coming a few years down the road. Probably most significant, the new roadmap will allow new features (that don’t require a significant rewrite of the phpBB core code) to be brought in to phpBB 3.x sooner than has been the habit with prior releases of phpBB.

On this episode, we go into very hefty detail about both the short-term and long-term impacts of these changes to phpBB’s release strategy, and of course, we’ll be keeping a very close eye going forward as these changes start to become implemented with future phpBB releases.

We also spent a bit of time discussing the fun that took place at the recent phpBB Developer Meeting in Cologne, Germany. Not only is it clear that Bertie had a good time, but a lot of discussion took place, some decisions were made (with the aforementioned development changes likely being one of them), and some touring of the city also took place. We also discussed a bit about the next official phpBB event, which will likely be held in New York City sometime in 2010 (“Libertyvasion”), though obviously it may be a few more months before details come out from the teams.

Finally, we briefly covered a few highlights from some recent commits to the Subversion repository for 3.0.6 (subscribe to the SVN mailing list). There are even more new features coming in 3.0.6 now, such as the ability to report private messages and the ability for a moderator to delete all unread private messages in a user’s outbox (anti-spam measure).

The MOD of the Week is Static Pages by ameeck, and the Style of the Week is Quilting ‘n’ Sewing by billstur.

Be to join us on next week’s episode, when Tom Beddard (subBlue) will join us as our special guest!

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Episode Duration: 1:00:21
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

How does one follow up the episode that we had last week, when we covered the surge of changes coming in 3.0.6? Well, for one thing, we did have the chance to hear the opinion of Mr. “We Know Where You Live, We’re Coming Now” himself, as we get Ash (NeoThermic) to give his opinion of the new quick reply coming in 3.0.6. Oh, and we did take some time to acknowledge the efforts of the Development Team to bring on new Junior Developers — combined with the full Development Team, we’re looking at the most developers phpBB has ever had at one time. Not too shabby, eh?

However, we decided to focus this show on a phpBB tutorial that we’ve never actually covered before, if you can believe that such a thing exists. We’re talking about Converting to phpBB. If you’ve got one of the Available Convertors, you can bring many other bulletin board programs (or in some cases, phpBB2 with certain MODs installed) up to phpBB3. In addition to going through how to convert a board over to phpBB3 (which is really easy, thanks to phpBB’s Unified Convertor Framework), we also overview what’s actually involved in building and maintaining a phpBB convertor.

Meanwhile, Micheal sympathizes with a Gumblar victim, and Douglas shares some new developments regarding OSCONvasion 2009. phpBB Weekly will (likely) be streaming live from OSCONvasion, on Thursday 7/23, so if you can’t join us in person, hopefully you can join in live!

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question, “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” continues through Saturday 6/27, so be sure to vote on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is AJAX Quick Edit by mac1706, and the Style of the Week is ClanzDarkness3 by Griffin.

Be sure to join us next week, when we will be joined by guest John Wells (Jhong) of the WP-United project! Share your questions for him on our forum.

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Episode Duration: 1:18:23
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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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!

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

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Episode Duration: 30:14
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

Some people say that moderation is overrated. Some people can be wrong, but nevertheless, this episode is dedicated to all of you moderators out there.

What’s new on phpBB.com? Well, the dev team has another new member: Kellanved, former MOD team member, has been promoted to a developer. Furthermore, the Knowledge Base appears to be finished and under way–we’re just waiting for the teams to populate the new Knowledge Base with articles. You can still find some of the old articles on this team member’s website. The new MOD and Style Databases are also starting to take form–but they’re not finished yet.

Douglas shows off the new Moderator Control Panel in phpBB3, including the ability to receive reports, warn users, ban users, and write notes about users, and much more. (Again, the number of panels your moderators see depends on how their permissions are set.) If you’re going to be a future moderator on a phpBB3 board, this episode will teach you about everything you’ll be able to do and how you do it.

Finally, the MOD of the Week is Simple Mod Resize Images by sancious, and the Style of the Week is What is Real? by Graphic.

There will be no phpBB Weekly on May 5th; episode #017 will be on May 12th at the same time.