phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:38:06
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

Well, we had kind of an interesting setup on this episode. Douglas recently broke his laptop, and ended up calling in using Skype on his new iPod touch. This left him unable to see the uStream chat room, or to browse ANY websites at all for that matter, aside from those that he had printed out in advance. On the flip side, David wound up impersonating Douglas on uStream in order to control the live stream. And Douglas’ lack of a laptop is the primary reason why this episode, which was recorded a week ago, took so long to get released (our sincerest apologies for that).

Anyway, our one and only topic for this episode is phpBB 3.0.6 Release Candidate 1 which was unexpectedly made available in a public release a week before this recording. The release announcement offers a HUGE list of over 150 new features, changes, and bugfixes since 3.0.5, making you wonder how on earth the Development Team squeezed so many things into this release over a time period of just over three months. The length of that list also equivocates with the length of this episode, where we really did spend over an hour and a half discussing that one topic.

But in the course of the show, not only do we go through the major new features of 3.0.6 once again, but Douglas comes up with a creative competition between David and Phil to go through the lists of “minor feature additions” and “smaller changes.” They also spend a bit more time discussing the 3.0.6 release in relation to phpBB’s recent development changes and new versioning scheme.

Our last poll question was “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” Here are the results:
“A tool that says ‘YOU IDIOT!’ if the phpBB installation hasn’t been updated in over a year.” 6 votes / 46%
“A coffee maker. (Because Erik Frerejean wouldn’t have it any other way.)” 4 votes / 31%
“An animated version of Marshalrusty’s “DON’T PANIC!” avatar.” 2 votes / 15%
“A Staples Easy Button.” 1 vote / 8%
“Sanitize (sanitise) anonymous users — as in it automatically eliminates insane anonymous users.” 0 votes / 0%
Total Votes: 13

The MOD of the Week is Simple Profile Comments by platinum_2007, and the Style of the Week is CA Halcyon by CyberAlien.

Want to help Douglas replace his broken computer, or are you interested in the Linux workstation he won from OSCON? Check out the eBay auction!

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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: 1:00:21
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: 1:41:13
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s just like old times on this episode of phpBB Weekly! Douglas and David are solo-hosting the show, David makes up a fake name for himself at the start of the show, and the episode lasts forever.

But on the contrary side of things, the main focus of this episode is an unprecedented announcement from the Development Team describing new features coming in phpBB 3.0.6, a “maintenance/bugfix release,” for Pete’s sake! We thoroughly analyze each of the announced new features and discuss what they’ll do, why they will be added, and what the effects will be for MOD authors in particular.

The new features include a new CAPTCHA plugins architecture, ATOM (RSS) feeds, support for four new cache/ACM plugins (and a no-cache option), exempting group leader permissions for groups, group management changes for the post queue and other permissions, separation/clarification of the Reply/Reply to All functions for private messages, pagination for smilies and icons, the ability to search logs, and other tiny features and bugfixes. And quick reply. Yes, Q U I C K R E P L Y, as Meik posted, representing a significant about-face from the phpBB teams which have traditionally been firmly against the inclusion of a quick reply feature since who knows when, and Douglas and David spend a bit of time talking about the significance of this quick reply concession and why we think it’s a good thing.

Then, Douglas formally announces the full details of the OSCONvasion 2009 meetup he is organizing, happening in San Jose, California in late-July. If you’re going to be in the Bay Area or are planning to come to OSCON, we hope you can make it!

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll question was “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” The top response was Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) with a whopping 13 votes (65%), followed by “The guy who made the front fall off” with 5 votes (25%), in closing up with Steve Wozniak and “The father of the internet” each receiving 1 vote (5%). President Barack Obama received 0 votes.
Our next phpBB Weekly Poll will be “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” The poll runs until Saturday, June 27th; vote in the right-hand sidebar on our site.

No MOD or Style of the Week this week. The episode’s closing music is Do You Know the Way to San Jose – Dionne Warwick, and the quick reply clip comes from the Discussion Panel at Londonvasion, and was also heard on phpBB Weekly #072.

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Download MP3 Episode (58.3 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:03:39
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), with a brief cameo from David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s a developer’s paradise on this episode of phpBB Weekly. phpBB 3.0.5 has been released, the “quite furry” edition, and the first phpBB release since late last year. With a slew of bugfixes, changes, and new features, headlining the bunch is a new CAPTCHA “wave” setting (to help improve over the cracked CAPTCHA from four months ago) and the long-awaited ability for users to refresh the displayed CAPTCHA. Improvements have now been made to the auto-updater as well, so if you haven’t gotten into the habit of using the auto-updater, now is a good time, as Phil explains.

But we’re already looking ahead to 3.0.6, as the Development Team has been busy pouring checkins to Subversion with some new backports from the Ascraeus branch. Included in there is a whole new “plugin” system for the CAPTCHA/Visual Confirmation which should make it easier for third-party CAPTCHAs to be incorporated to phpBB, although it will mean that authors of existing CAPTCHA MODs may have to do some rewriting pretty soon. Also backported is support for software-based caching engines such as XCache and eAccelerator, which should produce better (and somewhat more secure) results than phpBB’s current op-cache based system. (At least, that’s my understanding of it–Phil gives a better explanation of it on the show, and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I got it wrong.)

Finally, the Development Team offers up another relic in the form of the phpBB Code Swarm video, and Douglas performs his uniquely epic take on the video, live on the show (as in NOT pre-recorded and NOT practiced at all). For those of you who are wanting to share it, it starts at the 37:30 timestamp.

Oh, and the Development Team is moving up in the world! TerraFrost, an acquisition from the MOD Team, has been promoted from Junior Developer to full-fledged Developer, and bantu (also from the MOD Team) is now a Junior Developer. Congrats, folks! Not to be outdone (or deprived of all of their members), the MOD Team has some new Junior Validators: Balint, CoC, daroPL, and platinum_2007.

The MOD of the Week is Quote User Back Link by Erik Frerejean, and the Style of the Week is aktif by napy8gen.

Finally, the bonus at the end of the show is the William Tell Overture by Spike Jones (Douglas’ inspiration for his code swarm video interpretation).