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Now that we’ve emerged from Londonvasion, we came on this episode still a bit hungover from the excitement of the event, and a little but unsure of what to cover, so we decided to talk about some of the latest news from phpBB.com, not expecting that the episode would turn out to be as long as it did. We’re also joined on this episode by Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), the Support Team leader.

The phpBB Discussion forums have been reorganized into one basic, general phpBB Discussion forum. We talk about what the change means and some of the reasons why it was implemented.

Then, there’s a new post on the phpBB.com Blog about template inheritance, a new feature coming in phpBB 3.0.3 based on some requests that originated at Londonvasion, and provides a way for style authors to simplify their styles by basing portions of them on other templates (like prosilver or subsilver2, for example). We talk a bit about template inheritance and describe how it will work.

Finally, for a topic that David requested, we discuss an ongoing discussion on the phpBB.com forums relating to the recent blog post on MOD Author feedback. We cover some of the issues that were brought up in this discussion and talk about how the MOD team should and better communicate with the MOD community, and some of the other documentation, ongoing projects, and tools that the MOD team is working on to help out MOD authors. The MOD team continues to accept feedback on the MOD Database and the validation process.

The MOD of the Week is RedBar3 by cherokee red, and the Style of the Week IS AeroBlue by jrolson.

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On this episode, we were expecting to be joined by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/bbPress/Automattic, but he didn’t make it to the episode. Instead, this episode primarily is the culmination of our attempts to stall for time in the hopes that Matt might make it. As we pass the time, we have a Picky Correction of the Week segment to correct some of the comments that David made last week about the phpBB.com Styles Demo. David also talks briefly about the phpBB team’s upcoming involvement at LinuxTag, and about his plans to go to Joomla! Day Vancouver (more on that coming soon).

The MOD of the Week is Activity Stats MOD for phpBB3 by Highway of Life (and he also unveiled an exclusive premiere of what’s coming soon for the MOD), and the Style of the Week is Grand Theft Auto 4 for phpBB3 by John Olson.

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Well, this episode of phpBB Weekly certainly did not run as intended. We had planned to have guests from the Tech Podcast Network join us to talk about their experiences with bulletin board-based websites, but to our surprise, none of them have worked with them before! Then, TalkShoe surprised us when they ended up doing a hardware move (and not warning us about it until half an hour into the show), which forced us to record this episode off of TalkShoe. And then, David ended up having to do the second half of the show from a car en route to the airport to catch a flight after the show, resulting in, well, not the greatest audio quality possible. Nevertheless, we did have a good (albeit technical) episode.

On this episode, David and I start out by welcoming the five (count them, five) new members of the Moderator Team, whom are cherokee red, ChrisRLG, darcie, dellsystem, and will_hough. We then take a look back at what caused the phpBB.com Outage last weekend, including what caused it, how serious it was, and how the teams have responded to it.

For the main part of the show, David takes a look at the many changes that will be coming in phpBB 3.0.RC6, including a new location for download.php, new dynamic login forms, the new use of check_form_key() and add_form_key() on all forms, new option so that you don’t have to use MD5 hashing anymore if you don’t want to, checking for the ‘IN_PHPBB’ constant in all files, and a number of other minor changes. MOD authors may want to check and see if their phpBB3 MODs will be RC-6 compatible.

The MOD of the Week is Last Posts Titles for phpBB2 by LEW21 and the Style of the Week is Sniper_Blue for phpBB3 by Sniper_E.

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Eric Faerber returns for his second appearance on phpBB Weekly, and one which probably is a bit more informative than his first appearance was (and the blame for that can go directly to Douglas). It’s also the day after Douglas’ birthday, and so we do a short celebration for him as well. We also do our best to run the show while phpBB.com is down for “unexpected maintenance”, and we also launch a new feature on this episode: the phpBB Weekly Trivia Question.

During the interview with Eric, David mentions a few more new Support Team members, and mentions that Acyd Burn has confirmed that there will be an RC-6 release coming. We also take a look at the new hooks system that was recently added into CVS and will be coming out with phpBB3 RC-6 and ask what it means for MODs, and Douglas reiterates his wish for a WordPressish plugin system for the MODding of the future. We also talk about other new things for MODs in phpBB3, and then ask Eric some user-submitted questions about the MOD Team. Eric also reveals a couple of details of the upcoming EasyMOD for phpBB3 (Codename: Blinky).

Since phpBB.com was down, we had to take our MOD and Style of the Week off of Star Trek Guide, which is probably the best alternative. Anyway, the MOD of the Week is PM Alert Layer for phpBB3 by angelside, and the Style of the Week is Aqua Glass for phpBB3 by Trent.

Incidentally, if you would like to send your birthday wishes to Douglas, the Star Trek Guide folks have already setup a topic for that.

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

I often have the sneaking suspicion that the phpBB teams are starting to post their announcements on Saturday afternoons intentionally so that I won’t cover it on the show. (Just kidding guys, I love you, really!) Anyway, SHS` posted today that the site will be going down to backup the posts table. I’m going to stir up the rumor mill a bit, but doesn’t that bring up a striking suspicion that a new release is on the way? It wouldn’t be the first time.

Anyway, keep an eye on the site. If there’s any announcements, I’ll be covering them in-depth during episode #017 on May 12th…