phpBB Weekly

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Episode

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

The news media is busy traveling from one convention in Denver to another in St. Paul, and that means that they’re all ignoring the most important convention of all: the 2008 phpBB MOD Authors Convention! Well, we didn’t, and our panel of experts (Douglas, David, and Paul) report live from the MOD Authors Convention, providing their analysis of the events and presentations of the convention, as well as wondering why the MOD team didn’t nominate someone to run for president.

Anyway, we did discuss the various sessions at the MOD Authors Convention and talk about some of the highlights that were discussed. For example, in the “future of MODding” session, there was a certain amount of discussion about the possibility of introducing “Junior Validators” into the validation process. If this went forward, this would be like allowing certain users to be able to participate in the “testing” phase of validation, but not the line-by-line/security/etc. phases, and could also serve as a way for the MOD team to evaluate possible new additions to the team.

We also recapped the announcement that Paul hinted about last week, which was that the MOD team’s MOD pre-validator (MPV) tool is now publicly available. We discuss MPV in detail, including how it works and how it compares to the previous mEAL tool that was chiefly written by David Smith (smithy_dll).

There was also discussion at the convention about the phpBB Wiki (which was formally announced towards the end of the day), which will serve as the primary source of development, MODding, and (possibly) styling documentation for phpBB, and like all wikis will be user-contributable. We talked a bit more about the Wiki and how the MOD team’s goal of streamlining its documentation (we’ve talked about this a few times recently) ties into this new announcement.

And of course, this episode took place during the second “phpBB3 MODding & Best Practices” session, which was supposed to be David’s session, except he kinda played hooky from that so he could join in on this episode. However, he does summarize the main points from his session for us, answers a few questions from us, and fields requests from our chat room and from the #phpbb-mod channel to publish his session as a book.

Additional links mentioned in this episode:
MAMP/MAMP Pro
Wiki article: Creating Modules for phpBB3
Wiki article: Adding Modules to phpBB3

And finally, we ran out of time to mention it on this episode, but you should really check out the recent blog post on CAPTCHAs in phpBB, which gives a very interesting look at the evolution of phpBB’s CAPTCHA (aka “visual confirmation image”) and some of the inherent problems with CAPTCHAs and other anti-spambot security techniques.

The MOD of the Week is Tabulated Survey at Topic Head by asinshesq, and the Style of the Week is prosilver Special Edition by Styles Robot (or, more accurately, the phpBB.com Styles Team).

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Episode

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

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.

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Episode

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

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!).

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Episode

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

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.

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