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Is your website secure? What if you learned that half a million websites have been hacked via SQL Injections just since last January? On this episode, David Lewis is joined by Paul (of the MODs Team) and Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic, Support Team Leader), in which they discuss how site owners can be aware of SQL injection vulnerabilities, how they can prevent vulnerabilities in their own site, and how you can identify possible SQL injections within MODs that you download. And for MOD authors out there, they discuss the phpBB3 framework and how you can use it to prevent SQL injections in MODs.

Plus, have you ever run phpBB3 and made a change to your site, but nothing changed? That’s probably due to phpBB3’s caching of content, templates, and themes. David and the others discuss how to properly purge the cache with phpBB3, as well as discussing the differences between the different kinds of cached content.

And of course, Londonvasion is getting ever-closer, and so we’ve got your latest fix on Londonvasion news right here, as usual. Stay tuned as we finalize phpBB Weekly’s own Londonvasion plans over the next few weeks; we’ll be keeping you posted.

The MOD of the Week is Purge cache from any page for phpBB3 by Elglobo, and the Style of the Week is Day Song for phpBB3 by APT92.

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Well, the inevitable has happened: it was announced this past week that phpBB2 will be going end of life later this year. Although nothing is happening immediately, download links for phpBB2 will be removed in October, followed by support ending in January, and all security patches ending in February, at which point phpBB2 will be officially retired and the teams will focus exclusively on phpBB3 from here on out. Other teams have or are in the process of announcing their individual plans surrounding the retiring of phpBB2.

We are joined on this episode by Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), the Support Team Leader, and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), a Support Team Member, to talk about this announcement. They talk about the many reasons that led this announcement to be made, particularly this early, and why the teams have decided that this decision is for the best. We also discuss how users hearing about this can prepare for the change, as well as assessing opinions pulled from the discussion topic on phpBB.com and the discussion on Star Trek Guide.

Also, we look ahead to our giveaway drawing in three weeks, and share the finalized list of prizes that we’re giving away. Plus, we look at our latest Londonvasion plans.

The MOD of the Week is Users default avatar for phpBB2 by leviatan21, and the Style of the Week is TheEighties Template for phpBB2 by phpbbmodded.de.

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Douglas was off taking a test during this episode, so he couldn’t make it, but then again, David forgot that it was Saturday, which is why the live stream of phpBB Weekly never happened! Whoops. Anyway, David managed to grab together a couple of team members to talk to for what could almost pass as another episode of the Official phpBB Podcast. So, on this episode, he’s joined by Paul Sohier (of the MOD Team), Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty of the Support Team), and Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic, Support Team Leader).

Anyway, this past week, the inevitable phpBB 3.0.1 was released featuring dozens of bugfixes, including two security-related fixes. As this marks the first non-RC-related update to phpBB3, they spend a little bit of time reviewing the process for updating from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 and the importance of keeping your boards up-to-date. In addition, they discuss other common support issues with upgrading and how upgrading relates to the importance of keeping core code changes in MODs down to a minimum for compatibility.

They then discuss the recent alpha release of a MOD by naderman (of the Development Team) of the Sphinx Search Plugin for phpBB. Sphinx is a free open-source SQL fulltext search engine that is now another option that you can use for indexing your board’s content on your search page, and will quite possibly be showing up in phpBB 3.2 “Ascraeus.”

Yuriy gives us a quick update on the latest Londonvasion details (and by the way, you should also check out phpBB Weekly’s latest Londonvasion plans), and David tells us about Star Trek Guide’s new MOD Manager, as well as how you can obtain the “Borg Invasion” style that was used for STG’s recent April Fools joke.

No MOD or Style of the Week was selected this week, but we promise that we will make up for lost time next week and get back into the MODs and Styles selections.

Technical Note: Apologies for the background sounds in this episode–David discovered after the fact that he forgot to turn off his Skype sound effects!

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We’re back from our vBulletin April Fools joke to throw a very full episode at you all as we catch up on the plethora of phpBB news that has been churning out over the past week or two.

We start off by briefly chatting with David about Star Trek Guide’s Deck 15 Stunt that they pulled for April Fools Day, including lobbying for him to release the code he used for Deck 15 as a MOD. Afterwards, we spend a little time talking about the upcoming phpBB 3.0.1 release (can you say “bugfixes,” anyone?), and discussing the beginning of the minor release candidates and the associated phpbb-qa mailing list.

We then turn to the 3.2 “Ascraeus” front and discuss some of the latest SVN checkins, including the beginnings of the new BBCode parser that Marek (APTX) checked in, and the new Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL) function that DavidMJ has committed, as well as the beginnings of a completely retooled posting API. We’ll be sharing more details about these new features soon once we learn more about them ourselves.

We take a bit of time to discuss once again the future of phpBB2, and how long it will last. NeoThermic calls in to offer some of his comments, and we spend some time discussing why some people would be in favor of killing phpBB2 and why others would be against it.

For the main part of the show, Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty) joins us to talk about Londonvasion 2008, the first major phpBB conference taking place all day in London on Sunday, July 20th, 2008. We chat with Yuriy about how Londonvasion came about and what will be taking place there, as well as beginning some initial discussions for how phpBB Weekly will plan to cover the event. If you have any suggestions for how you want us to cover this event, please see our Londonvasion Topic in the phpBB Weekly forum.

There was no MOD or Style of the Week this week since we were limited on time for this episode.

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Douglas returns from picking up around the Bay Area, and after telling an interesting and disappointing story from his excursion (which has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with phpBB3), he takes the reins and very thoroughly goes over the topic of banning. Covered on this show is why would you want to ban users? How do you ban users using phpBB? What are the differences in banning controls between phpBB2 and phpBB3? We also talk about how the phpBB3 warnings system can fit in here and discuss the importance of having set rules and guidelines on your forum, along with a cautionary warning about not getting carried away with banning users. (After all, you want to attract users to your forum, not send them away!) And then, Douglas selects two MODs of the Week which bring some of phpBB3’s enhanced banning functionality within the grasp of phpBB2 administrators. David also gives us the latest lowdown on recent changes to the phpBB teams, including a brand new Support Team leader, and then we announce some of the exciting episodes that will be coming up.

The two MODs of the Week this week are Ban Reasons and Temp Ban, both by eviL<3 for phpBB2. The Style of the Week is Thor by Wizardly for phpBB3.
If you would like to recommend a MOD or Style of the Week to us to be featured on a future episode (subject to our approval), bookmark it on del.icio.us with the tag “phpbbwmod” or “phpbbwstyle”.

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