phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:00:21
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

How does one follow up the episode that we had last week, when we covered the surge of changes coming in 3.0.6? Well, for one thing, we did have the chance to hear the opinion of Mr. “We Know Where You Live, We’re Coming Now” himself, as we get Ash (NeoThermic) to give his opinion of the new quick reply coming in 3.0.6. Oh, and we did take some time to acknowledge the efforts of the Development Team to bring on new Junior Developers — combined with the full Development Team, we’re looking at the most developers phpBB has ever had at one time. Not too shabby, eh?

However, we decided to focus this show on a phpBB tutorial that we’ve never actually covered before, if you can believe that such a thing exists. We’re talking about Converting to phpBB. If you’ve got one of the Available Convertors, you can bring many other bulletin board programs (or in some cases, phpBB2 with certain MODs installed) up to phpBB3. In addition to going through how to convert a board over to phpBB3 (which is really easy, thanks to phpBB’s Unified Convertor Framework), we also overview what’s actually involved in building and maintaining a phpBB convertor.

Meanwhile, Micheal sympathizes with a Gumblar victim, and Douglas shares some new developments regarding OSCONvasion 2009. phpBB Weekly will (likely) be streaming live from OSCONvasion, on Thursday 7/23, so if you can’t join us in person, hopefully you can join in live!

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question, “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” continues through Saturday 6/27, so be sure to vote on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is AJAX Quick Edit by mac1706, and the Style of the Week is ClanzDarkness3 by Griffin.

Be sure to join us next week, when we will be joined by guest John Wells (Jhong) of the WP-United project! Share your questions for him on our forum.

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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.