phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:15:18
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), Igor Wiedler (evil<3), and Damian (Obsidian/Desdenova)

It’s kind of ironic that for this podcast, 2009 has turned into a year where CAPTCHAs seem to get all of our focus. Especially considering how much we hate them. They’re simply a necessary evil, kind of like insurance companies. Nevertheless, we dedicate yet another episode to the discussion of Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

But why? Well, the submission period for the phpBB MOD Team’s Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition just ended. Once the MOD validators finish validating the submitted CAPTCHA plugins over the next few weeks, then both the phpBB teams and the community will have the opportunity to vote on their favorite CAPTCHA plugin (the winners of which will receive a free Bertie). However, we couldn’t wait for the voting to start, so we ran our own survey asking MOD Authors to tell us about their CAPTCHA plugins, and so we spent some time describing and critiquing those plugins.

CAPTCHA Plugins Featured:
Crazy Maths CAPTCHA by eviL<3
Sortables CAPTCHA Plugin by Derky
Fancy jQuery CAPTCHA by mtotheikle (similar to this CAPTCHA)
SimpleMath by nickvergessen
Rotate Image CAPTCHA Plugin by Brainy

Douglas also pointed out that in a recent checkin to Subversion, the Development Team is apparently almost ready to seed phpBB 3.0.6 RC-1 to the QA Team. He and Igor discuss a bit about if phpBB 3.0.6 might have qualified as 3.1 under the new development roadmap, and why the teams decided to keep it as 3.0.6 instead of switching to 3.1. Douglas also shares that he’s hoping to organize another phpBB users meetup in Washington, DC in early 2010. And Damian and Igor talk a little bit about the phpBBModders.net community which they are a part of.

Our poll question, “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” continues until Saturday, September 12. Vote in the poll on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is Ban Hammer by SyntaxError90, and the Style of the Week is Reds by Culprit.

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Episode Duration: 1:32:27
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), Erik Frerejean (erikfrerejean), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman)

Just because we’re all busy for the 4th of July holiday, doesn’t mean we can’t warm it up with a bang the night before! We got as big of a crowd together as we could for this fire-crackling episode of phpBB Weekly–which wasn’t live, allowing us to pull off a few stunts.

We start by taking another look at the Support Toolkit which hit its first release candidate a little over a week ago. Erik, who helped build the Support Toolkit, gave us a nice rundown of what the Toolkit does and what it’s goals are. Phil also wanted us to give some love (which Douglas took a little literally) to his Support Request Template Generator, which makes it quite a bit easier to submit a support request following the template. If you haven’t heard, it’s a good idea to use the Support Request Template.

David gives us a sneak preview of the Coffee Maker MOD that he’s planning for phpBB 3.2, which will require the USBWine attachment. Whether it’s USBWine or BBCoffee, Douglas probably won’t be satisfied until he can get root beer through a spout over the internet.

[20:44:03] * DavidIQ gags FountainOfApples
[20:44:30] <FountainOfApples> with the phpBB coffee, right?
[20:44:36] <FountainOfApples> that stuff is the worst brew ever
[20:44:42] <FountainOfApples>
[20:46:13] <DavidIQ> well that was while Highway|Away was doing it…American coffee is just blah

The blog post CAPTCHA Plugins and You discusses the new CAPTCHA plugins architecture coming in phpBB 3.0.6, and we look at the announcement in-depth, including what it will mean for style authors, MOD authors, and end users (after some transition, pure spambot-free heaven).

Finally, Douglas talks about a new book he’s been reading, Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. He talks about his experiences and thoughts after converting one of his projects over to OOP mode, and David and Francis promptly scare him again with more technical talk, but overall, we do have a bit of an interesting discussion about the merits of OOP vs. procedural programming. Finally, we all take our best crack and pronouncing Paamayim Nekudotayim, the true name of PHP’s scope resolution operator, and a fancy Hebrew name for “double colon” (::). As if programmers weren’t busy enough.
Overall, Douglas says that he did learn a bit from the book and that it helped make OOP more approachable, but he noted that really only the first two or three chapters are applicable to beginners, and criticized it for breezing through more complex code examples without much explanation, and for an obvious lack of proofreading.

There was no MOD or Style of the Week this week. Credits for this week’s musical escapades go to God Bless the USA – The Hit Crew and Stand Up Comedy – U2. Be sure to join us next Saturday, when we return live to the TalkShoe airwaves!

[20:58:41] <leviatan21> I think all of you are insane !!!
[21:02:25] <DavidIQ> that’s a requirement to be a coder

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Episode Duration: 1:41:13
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s just like old times on this episode of phpBB Weekly! Douglas and David are solo-hosting the show, David makes up a fake name for himself at the start of the show, and the episode lasts forever.

But on the contrary side of things, the main focus of this episode is an unprecedented announcement from the Development Team describing new features coming in phpBB 3.0.6, a “maintenance/bugfix release,” for Pete’s sake! We thoroughly analyze each of the announced new features and discuss what they’ll do, why they will be added, and what the effects will be for MOD authors in particular.

The new features include a new CAPTCHA plugins architecture, ATOM (RSS) feeds, support for four new cache/ACM plugins (and a no-cache option), exempting group leader permissions for groups, group management changes for the post queue and other permissions, separation/clarification of the Reply/Reply to All functions for private messages, pagination for smilies and icons, the ability to search logs, and other tiny features and bugfixes. And quick reply. Yes, Q U I C K R E P L Y, as Meik posted, representing a significant about-face from the phpBB teams which have traditionally been firmly against the inclusion of a quick reply feature since who knows when, and Douglas and David spend a bit of time talking about the significance of this quick reply concession and why we think it’s a good thing.

Then, Douglas formally announces the full details of the OSCONvasion 2009 meetup he is organizing, happening in San Jose, California in late-July. If you’re going to be in the Bay Area or are planning to come to OSCON, we hope you can make it!

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll question was “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” The top response was Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) with a whopping 13 votes (65%), followed by “The guy who made the front fall off” with 5 votes (25%), in closing up with Steve Wozniak and “The father of the internet” each receiving 1 vote (5%). President Barack Obama received 0 votes.
Our next phpBB Weekly Poll will be “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” The poll runs until Saturday, June 27th; vote in the right-hand sidebar on our site.

No MOD or Style of the Week this week. The episode’s closing music is Do You Know the Way to San Jose – Dionne Warwick, and the quick reply clip comes from the Discussion Panel at Londonvasion, and was also heard on phpBB Weekly #072.