phpBB Weekly

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Download MP3 Episode (82.9 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:12:25
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

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NOTE: These show notes do not contain as many links as we would like them to due to the phpBB.com outage. We will add more links where appropriate once phpBB.com is back.

Douglas was at a conference in San Francisco during this episode, and you know what that means: David brings on guest team members to help him out. He was joined on this episode by Paul of the MOD Team, Francis Lewis (Handyman) of the MOD Team and StarTrekGuide, and Michael Williams (mtotheikle), Development Leader of StarTrekGuide. And the topic of discussion? Our well-known favorite topic of discussion–MODs.

First off, MODX 1.2.2 and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 have been simultaneously released. MODX 1.2.2 mainly contains a number of XSL fixes and tweaks, and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 includes a few new features and a number of bugfixes. The four of them also discuss some of their favorite MODs, take a look at some of the biggest MODs for phpBB3 and phpBB2, and chat about how MODding has evolved from phpBB2 to phpBB3.

February 1st marked the last day that the Development Team would release security patches for phpBB2, thus ending any and all support for phpBB2. It also marked the last day that any phpBB2 submissions would be accepted into the MODs Database. We talk about the ending of security patches as well as discuss how long it would take for very large boards to upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3. Finally, they also discuss the recent blog post on phpBB.com discussing why team members don’t give private support to users.

Last week’s poll question, “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?”, is still open and will run through Saturday, February 7. So go vote!
The MOD of the Week is Mods Database by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is Hermes by CyberAlien.

Be sure to join us next week when we will have a special edition phpBB Weekly episode with featured discussion of the ongoing phpBB.com outage, joined by members of the phpBB teams who have been busy this week rebuilding the site.

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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.