phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 47:40
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life) and Paul Sohier (Paul)

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Douglas was away on a tour of Beijing, China with his school during this episode (which partially explains why this episode was somewhat late in its release), so David was joined on this episode by Paul (of the MOD team) to go through the latest flurry of phpBB news.

In this episode, David and Paul began by talking about the release of MODX 1.2.0, covering the changes and the benefits that the new version provides to the MODding community, as well as the much much easier MOD packaging policies. In addition, the Styles Database and Demo were officially opened, meaning that phpBB3 styles submissions will finally start to be validated! Yay!

They also recap on BertieZilla’s experiences at LinuxTag Berlin, where the phpBB guys shared a booth with Joomla! and gave out gummy-Berties. And, speaking of Berties, it looks like Bertie 3.0 is about to be shipped!

Finally, David, Francis, and two other team members will be at Joomla!Day Vancouver on June 14th, and David gives a preview of what to expect.

The MOD of the Week is Display user’s age in viewtopic for phpBB3 by EY, and the Style of the Week is ComicBook for phpBB3 by thecharmed01.

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

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Episode Duration: 1:26:52
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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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.

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Episode Duration: 1:27:53
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

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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.

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

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Download MP3 Episode (34.6 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:00:32
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

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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.

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!