Download Episode

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

On this non-live episode of phpBB Weekly, David and Douglas go through a bunch of old news, recapping it and covering some new developments. We start by briefly mentioning the new phpBB Weekly theme/album artwork project that is in progress right now, and invite anyone who’s interested to participate.

You can now register for Londonvasion, which opened up a few weeks ago, along with a number of other details that Yuriy made available. We also (once again) do a recap on our latest plans for Londonvasion coverage, as well as answer a few questions that we’ve heard about it.

David gives us a recap on the MOD Team’s Package Manager (Blinky). In doing so, he also unveils some of the new features in the upcoming release of the MODX 1.2 spec for the first time.

Douglas and David then chat a bit about Sphinx for phpBB, another project in the phpBB Code Forge that is being put together by Development Team member Nils Adermann (naderman). Sphinx is an SQL full-text search engine that is already being used on phpBB.com and will likely be made available as an additional search plugin for a future release of phpBB3.

David then reveals that the new phpBB3 Styles Database has finally been completed and has been opened up! (The new Styles Demo only has one style in it at the moment: subsilver2.) You can now expect to start seeing styles hopefully be added to the database, and we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes open on there. We also speculate over whether or not there will end up being a Styles Demo for phpBB2 as well, but that question has yet to be answered…

And finally, we do a recap from our vBulletin Weekly April Fools joke by chatting about the recent vBulletin 3.7, which is virtually your own Facebook in a box. But since Jelsoft really knows the right way to celebrate a new release, we also take some time to discuss their simultaneous announcements of immediate end-of-life for vBulletin 3.0 and 3.5, along with end-of-life in six months for vBulletin 3.6; as well as unprecedented licensing changes (aka price increases) for vBulletin licenses. If you thought that phpBB’s end of life announcement was sudden, you probably won’t think that anymore!

The MOD of the Week is Forum Sponsor for phpBB3 by EXreaction, and the Style of the Week is VidoStyle for phpBB3 by [urban] & Shadow_One.

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

Download Episode

A sarcastic thanks to a couple of phpBB team members (who shall be nameless) for correcting my mistake: #phpbb-mod is “hash phpbb-mod”, not “pound phpbb-mod”, even though most people in the US of A call it a “pound” and the rest of the world calls it a “hash”. From now on, I’m just calling it a “number sign”. *rolls eyes*

phpBB3 RC-2 has been released! The changelog for this release includes a whopping 113 fixes and changes. Plus, for the first time, upgrading with the built-in auto-updater is officially supported! Douglas tried out the auto-updater this morning, and sings its praises (as well as explaining how it works).

The GNU General Public License version 3 is final, but according to Meik “AcydBurn” Sievertsen, don’t expect phpBB to be using the new version. Douglas talks a bit about what this means, and also what it means in terms of licensing MODs.

It was announced today that submissions to the MOD Database are now open! First impression of the new forms: lots of bugs! However, paul999 has been moving quickly to fix as many bugs as he can today, so hopefully we can give you a better impression next week.

Finally, we talk a bit about the MOD Authors Convention that has been ongoing today, including critiquing it and offering suggestions for how we think it should be run. The convention continues today in #phpbb-mod until 8 PM Eastern time tonight!

The MOD of the Week is Collapsed Categories by Default by Wicher, and the Style of the Week is JM-Ignited by jmignited (view demo).

Finally, a shout out to phpBBCast, thanking them for promoting and covering phpBB Weekly episodes!