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David is away on this episode (and will probably be away on episode #046 as well) as he goes through the necessary steps of his move to Spokane, Washington. However, on this Year in Review episode, Douglas walks through all of the major announcements and events that took place for phpBB during the year 2007, including all of the beta and RC releases, the website outages, prosilver, the Community Choice Awards, MOD Team announcements, and of course, the 3.0.0 release. He also looks ahead into the year 2008 and pinpoints some of the things that we can expect to come down the road in the next few months.

In addition, the latest update on what has been going on with Douglas’ whole webhost fiasco and a final recap of the year 2007 for phpBB Weekly are also provided.

All of the major announcements covered in this episode can be found in the phpBB Announcements forum. Some of the links that were mentioned in particular on the episode included the designing prosilver feature, Bertie Conquers Olympus on Mars, and the information page for the RokBridge extension.

The MOD of the Week is Prime Notify PM for phpBB3 by primehalo, and the Style of the Week is Flash Web for phpBB3 by digitalnerd.

Have a very happy new year (and don’t party too hard)! See you all in the year 2008!

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

Hello everyone!
I am really excited to be able to announce that after being down for 18 days, phpBBWeekly.net is back online!
On December 4th, something happened to my cPanel username/password causing them to change. I’m not sure what happened to cause the change, but I certainly had nothing to do with it.
So why did it take 18 days for the site to come back up? Well, I had bombarded my web host for weeks with support requests, and never got a response. Yesterday, I finally got angry enough about it that I did a WHOIS on my host’s domain name, found a phone number, called them up, and found out that my host strangely still had my old Mac.com e-mail address on file–an e-mail address which expired five months ago. (Their policy–which is a good one–is to only accept support requests from the e-mail address which they have on file, for security reasons.) So, once the guy on the phone updated the e-mail address I had on file, my support request got a response, and my username and password got reset, and now the site is back online.
So, I guess I do kind of owe my web host, Kazix.com, an apology, because I had honestly started telling people that they had packed up shop and left town. That wasn’t the case at all–just a bit of a miscommunication, which caused the outage of the past 18 days.
Anyway, phpBB Weekly episodes #042 and #043 will be posted on here shortly, and then hopefully we can move on from all of this. I’ll just consider the fact that the site is finally back up a nice little early Christmas present.
Again, I’m very sorry for the outage and tried everything I could to get it out of the way ASAP. Thanks for continuing to stick around with phpBB Weekly!
–-Douglas Bell

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A lot of weird stuff has been happening around the phpBB community this past week, most of which is the fault of the phpBB team members. First, all of the team members in an over-obvious ploy turned all of their avatars into weird-looking gold replicas (King Midas must have visited phpBB.com!), then David puts all kind of weird encrypted messages on Star Trek Guide leading to this video (passcode: goldday), and now we have a countdown which doesn’t count down to the final release, but counts down to the time when the phpBB teams will tell us when the final release will be, thus enabling us to start the countdown to the final release, etc.

Unfortunately, Douglas doesn’t like suspense, and so the disputes between himself and David during the past week come to a peak as Douglas interrogates David and the other team members on the live show about how crazy they are to pull off all these shenanigans, and in particular David for pulling off his own miniature MacHeist.

In other news, the phpBB Weekly website has been down since Tuesday, and it’s completely the fault of Douglas’ webhost, which has not been responding to his persistent e-mails. As Douglas tries more drastic actions, he asks the phpBB Weekly listeners to chip in and send e-mails to his webhost to see if we can get their attention so Douglas can regain access to phpBBWeekly.net. Please see this forum topic for more info and the latest updates on the situation.

The MOD of the Week is Ajax Shoutbox for phpBB3 by Paul (incidentally, Paul has a test board; username/password is “tester” without quotes), and the Style of the Week is Christmas Style by Kber. We’d still love for listeners to recommend their favorite MODs and Styles to us for consideration on future phpBB Weekly episodes.

Please be sure to join us next week, December 15th, when we will be joined by Johan Jannsens, the project manager and lead developer of Joomla! This will be an exciting episode where we will get to learn a bit about some exciting post-Olympus-release events coming up in phpBB’s near future, plus it will be our last episode before we go on holiday break.

The special intro music for this episode is Also Sprach Zarathustra by Deodato, which was specially picked to commemorate the countdown for phpBB 3.0.0 (and is not going to be our new theme music, don’t worry).

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