phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 51:40
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and John Wells (Jhong)

We’re joined on this episode by John Wells (Jhong), the guy behind the WP-United project, an integration between WordPress and phpBB3. He joins us all the way from Shanghai, China, where it is after midnight during this episode. And, courtesy of the Chinese government, we have a little bit of audio quality fun along the way, along with an unexpected encounter with a cheesy arrangement of “Ode to Joy.”

But I digress. John tells us all about WP-United, including why he started it, some of its history, some of its very interesting features (such as the ability to “blend” WordPress and phpBB elements on the same page), and how an administrator would get it to work. We also discuss a little bit about programming the integration for phpBB2 vs. phpBB3, and compare it to phpBB3′s Hook System which makes other integrations like the RokBridge-Joomla! integration possible.

Then, Micheal takes the opportunity to go over the phpBB Support Toolkit, which just had its first RC release this week. This is sure to be a very powerful and useful tool once it goes final, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it on this show.

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll was “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” There were 35 votes cast, shattering our previous record of 20. Here’s the results:
10 votes (29%) for an “Automatic idiot user filter.”
6 votes (17%) for a “Rocket launcher (David’s suggestion).”
6 votes (17%) for “A front that doesn’t fall off.”
5 votes (14%) for a “Coffee maker. (Take that, Starbucks!)”
3 votes (9%) for “The kitchen sink.”
3 votes (9%) for “Insurance from Paul’s continuous slapping.”
And 2 other votes (6%): “no new features!” and “Nicole Scherzinger”.

Our new poll is “What would be the most likely impact of enabling Quick Reply on your board?” Vote in this poll in the sidebar on the right; this poll will be open until Saturday, July 11.

The MOD of the Week is User Notes/Warnings in Viewtopic by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is AcidTech Tiger by CyberAlien.

And, credits for the closing bonus goes to a Muppet interpretation of “Ode to Joy”.

Remember that there will not be a live episode next weekend due to the 4th of July holiday (in the United States); our next live episode will be on July 11th.

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 (51.2 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:29:28
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

On this non-live “Anything Goes” episode, Douglas is joined by the “Spokane Clan”–David Lewis, Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle). They’re all from Spokane, all bigwigs on StarTrekGuide, and are all celebrating the retirement of phpBB2 while Douglas continues mourning it.

The main topic of conversation is the recent blog post on session integration and other ways of integrating phpBB with your website. While we (and by we, we mean David) have discussed this before, we go significantly in-depth on the subject in this episode, including integrating the sessions, auths, templates, languages, DBAL–essentially the entire framework of phpBB in order to allow your website to seamlessly integrate with phpBB. WARNING: This is one of our much more technical topics and likely not intended for the faint-hearted. Most of the things we discussed can be found as articles on the phpBB Development Wiki.

Douglas was also on WordPress Weekly the other day, and one of the topics of conversation included bridges between phpBB and other platforms (such as Joomla!, WordPress, etc.). We extend that conversation on bridges a bit as well, and we’ll go a bit more in-depth on a number of bridge solutions that have popped up during the year 2008 on upcoming episodes of phpBB Weekly.

Finally, an interesting topic on phpBB.com’s General Discussion forum asked Is there a Government Plan to Close Down the Internet? We discuss the merits of this conspiracy theory but also chat a bit about the deeper serious issue of Net Neutrality. If you want to learn more about Net Neutrality and what you can do to protect it, visit SaveTheInternet.com.

Last week’s Poll Question of the Week was “What do you think of phpBB Weekly’s new website?” There were 11 votes (78.57%) saying “Wow, it’s awesome!”; 2 votes (14.29%) saying “Not as good as it was before.”; and 1 vote (7.14%) with No Opinion. This week’s poll question is “Do YOU think there’s a government plan to close down the internet?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on January 24th.

The MOD of the Week is Print a Post Mod by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is Glass Softblue (and other color choices as well) by DoubleJ.

Credit for our fake sponsor of the week goes to A Prairie Home Companion – Garrison Keillor.

As a reminder, phpBB Weekly will not be live on January 17th, but will return live during our usual timeslot on January 24th.