phpBB Weekly

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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.

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Download MP3 Episode (22.5 MB)

Episode Duration: 39:21
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

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

IMPORTANT! Contrary to what was said on this episode, we are still going to be doing our live episode streaming from Londonvasion as planned.

This episode, however, did not go according to plan, due to the fact that the team members had an important presentation to be at that conflicted with this live episode, and the London hotel that they were staying at had a miserably poor internet connection. (The hotel has promised that there will be a much, much better connection at Londonvasion, according to an e-mail David sent awhile after this episode ended.) So Douglas, left by himself, tried to fill for time by discussing some of the team member photos from Londonvasion and covering what will be discussed at Londonvasion based on the finalized schedule.

In addition, voting in the phpBBHacks.com Idol has begun, and Douglas explains how the voting will work and who is up against who. Go help determine who will win all of the fabulous prizes and their own library of books (not to mention the ever-important bragging rights)!

Finally, on the request of the ever-helpful chat room on TalkShoe, Douglas summarizes the latest MOD team post on the blog concerning MOD author feedback and how they handle it.

The MOD of the Week is Advanced Meta Tags by Drugs, and the Style of the Week is Getaway by CyberAlien.

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

Hello everyone,

I’m currently writing this from an iMac at an Apple Store, stealing their internet. My internet connection at home is not working because the cable on my router broke, and new ones are only available direct from my ISP (which means it won’t get in for a little while).

For tomorrow’s episode of phpBB Weekly, I will be taking my laptop and headphones over to my local library and grabbing a private “study” room that’s available there, utilizing their free (and hopefully reliable) wifi. However, since they don’t open until sometime later in the morning, phpBB Weekly will be starting 90 minutes later than usual, at 1:30 PM EDT (17:30 UTC) instead. I apologize for the inconvenience and hope that you will still be able to make it to the show.

Thanks for working with me on this, and we hope to see you tomorrow for our very special episode!