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: 55:32
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life) and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

David and Michael fill in for Douglas on this episode, who had to duck out at the last minute. They spend some more time discussing the ongoing (and quickly-moving) development of the upcoming phpBB 3.0.6 release, and also discuss the features that they would most like to see in a 3.0.x release.

Finally, on Douglas’ behalf, David describes the fundraising efforts that we’re putting together to help us rein in some equipment to use at OSCONvasion 2009. There are some sponorship opportunities available as well!

The MOD of the Week is FAQ Manager by EXreaction, and the Style of the Week is SkyLine by MartectX.

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Episode Duration: 1:20:16
On this episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Paul Sohier (Paul)

Talk about one whacky reunion episode. Douglas comes in fresh off of his high school graduation and is stumped as to why he is not entirely fast asleep during the show. David and Francis make their grand return after 3 months’ absence, and as a skit, they hold a SCOFF News-style interview of Australian Senator Collins about a crashed oil tanker. Paul will slap Douglas to high heaven if this episode isn’t released before the end of May, and we have all kinds of crazy technical difficulties throughout the show. (And yes, that stuttering that happens during the first 2-3 minutes? That’s David’s fault too.)

Nevertheless, we have kind of a random discussion episode, during which Micheal shares a bit more about the FTP Trojans that we discussed last week, we share rumors on what’s taken so long for the release of phpBB 3.0.5 (and typical to fashion, it was just released today), and David shares the incredible saga that has taken him and Francis away from phpBB for the past few months and continuing for the next few months as well. Douglas takes the opportunity to share some plans for helping to revitalize phpBB Weekly during the remaining summer months of David’s prolonged leave of absence, and we also talk a bit about the best readme file ever.

There is no MOD or Style of the Week this week. Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” Vote in the poll in our sidebar on the right; the poll closes Saturday, June 13.

And don’t miss the little bonus featurette at the end of the episode; I spent a lot of time editing that!

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Episode Duration: 1:02:19
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

On this episode, Douglas had just gotten back from Washington, D.C., and was thawing out. (Actually, make-up work from his week-long absence is the reason why this episode took so long to get released; sorry about that.) Nevertheless, we somehow accomplished David’s continual quest for “shorter episodes” with a release that is just barely over an hour. Not too shabby. And they said it couldn’t be done.

In addition to a bit of reflection from the inauguration, we pretty much covered some of the recent news. David gave us a preview of the upcoming release of MODX 1.2.2 (which has actually now been released, but we’ll talk about that on our next episode), and then he mentioned that a new variation on phpBB’s CAPTCHA has been committed to Subversion for 3.0.5 that will allow you to add a “wave” to the CAPTCHA image. (See the before and after.) Douglas also shares some of his experiences with reCAPTCHA, a good alternative CAPTCHA service for those of you who want a CAPTCHA that’s a little bit more humane. (Anyone want to write a phpBB3 MOD for it?)

David and Douglas also cover the recent blog post on fighting CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) and the measures that phpBB takes (and MOD authors should take) to help protect against CSRF. And in passing, David also shares that a new Junior Developers Team has started, and the developers have put together a very comprehensive page on how you can get involved with phpBB development.

Last week’s Poll Question of the Week was “Do YOU think there’s a government plan to close down the internet?” There were 2 votes (16.67%) saying “Yes, there certainly is.”; 4 votes (33.33%) saying “No way, this is just a crazy conspiracy theory.”; 5 votes (41.67%) saying “The government is watching every move I make, therefore I cannot provide a definitive answer to this question.”; and 1 vote (7.14%) saying “How the heck should we know? Or care?”. This week’s poll question is “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on February 7th.

The MOD of the Week is IGN Style Colored Names by Trel, and the Style of the Week is twilightBB by Daniel Exe.

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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!

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