phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:09:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

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.

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Episode Duration: 1:18:53
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Paul Sohier (Paul)

This episode turned out to be a packed episode as we added a number of last-minute topics right before the show. We ended up having an unexpected interview with Paul Sohier, MOD Team Member, and we chatted with him a little bit about the MOD/Style Databases (which he’s responsible for designing) and MOD validation.

Furthermore, the PHP teams have announced that they will be formally discontinuing PHP 4 after this year (and security fixes after 2008-08-08). We chat about whether or not this is a good idea and what this means for phpBB, particularly phpBB2, which is not even officially supported under PHP 5. Then, David and I debate whether or not the phpBB teams should advance phpBB2 a bit after the final release of phpBB3, and on whether or not it’s important for the teams to maintain a more “lite” version of phpBB alongside the more complete and more complex phpBB3.

Finally, David talks about the new concept of modules in phpBB3 and what it means for MOD authors and administrators, along with a basic tutorial on how to build modules in phpBB3 and install them. For more info on modules, check out the modules documentation.

The MOD of the Week is Disable Post Editing After X Hours by Throckmorton, and the Style of the Week is RedSilver by jozomannen. Both run on phpBB2. If you want to recommend a MOD or Style (great opportunity here for self-promotion!), bookmark it on del.icio.us with the tag “phpbbwmod” or “phpbbwstyle”.

Just a note that we will be taking another 2-week intermission from live shows. We will be recording an episode #028 off of TalkShoe sometime during the next few weeks, followed by #029 back on TalkShoe on Saturday, September 1st. Also, thanks again to our sponsor, Audible.com.