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 MP3 Episode (55.3 MB) | Download Episode Chat Log

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.

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 MP3 Episode (38.5 MB)

Episode Duration: 42:02
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Paul Sohier (Paul)

Michael and Douglas are joined on this episode by an old friend, Paul Sohier, who is now on a new team: the Support Team. For obvious reasons, Micheal is pleased and Douglas a bit confused, but Paul explains that he’s been working in support longer than he’s been working with MODs, and has been enjoying the change of pace.

The MOD Team, however, hasn’t been standing still. Once again, a new release to talk about: AutoMOD has hit RC-1. Exciting, you bet, particularly since EasyMOD never made it out of beta! While it’s not approved for fully-stable use yet, AutoMOD is about to hit the big time, and we’ll continue to follow its progress over the summer.

Micheal mentions that this old blog post simply identifies possibilities that injections could be created by MODs if the authors aren’t careful–it does NOT list actual injection vulnerabilities in phpBB3! Beware the naysayers!

And for our main topic of discussion, a new phpBB.com blog post discusses the Gumblar and Martuz trojans, two trojans which track down your FTP credentials and then use them to trash your site(s). We go over the blog post and discuss what these trojans do, how they work, and how to keep yourself safe (hint: keep your antivirus definitions up-to-date!). Also be sure to keep regular backups of your site so that if it does get hacked (it may not be your fault if your site IS hacked), you can completely wipe the hacked site and start fresh. If your site has been hacked, use Unmask Parasites to do a thorough check once you’ve cleaned house.

The MOD of the Week is Posting Template by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Prospace by spaceace.

Be sure to join us on Saturday, May 30th, for David Lewis’ return to phpBB Weekly and important announcements about this show, as well as Douglas’ post-graduation attempts to stay awake!