phpBB Weekly

This has been one heck of a week for phpBB, as evidenced by the dozens of e-mails that David and I have been sending back and forth to each other. (We rarely e-mail each other at all usually.) Not only has phpBB.com suffered a major outage caused by probably the most severe hack they have experienced to date (noting, of course, that it was NOT a fault of the phpBB software itself), but in a completely unrelated incident, many phpBB users have been reporting a sudden spike in spam registrations on phpBB boards. Of course, this has been quite a lot for the phpBB teams to handle all at once, and I commend them for their hard work to stay afloat this week.

David and I have been preparing for a very significant episode of phpBB Weekly tomorrow during which we will fully cover and address all of the details surrounding these two critical issues. David is also arranging to hopefully have some members of the phpBB teams join us to provide more inside details on both of these issues, but we will not know for sure in advance who will be joining us because of the massive amount of work that the teams are facing right now.

Nevertheless, we would like to invite you to join us tomorrow, Saturday, February 7th at 12:00 EST (1700 UTC) for this critical episode of phpBB Weekly, and please spread the word about this episode as much as you can, in particular to any administrators of phpBB boards that are being affected by the spam registrations issue. We also want to remind you that we invite you to participate in the show by asking us questions either in the chat room or by calling in live. We represent all of you, the listeners, and so we want to be sure that we fill you in on the current situations that the phpBB community is facing. We will also do our best to release the episode on phpBBWeekly.net within 12 hours of the end of the live stream.

If you can’t join us during the episode tomorrow but have any questions that you would like us to cover, you may also feel free to ask them in this topic on our forum.

Click on the ShareThis button below to quickly spread the word about this episode on one of your social networks or blogs, or e-mail it to your friends. And we hope to see you during tomorrow’s episode. Thanks!
–Douglas Bell
Co-Host and Editor, phpBB Weekly

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (49.7 MB)

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

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (51.9 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:30:41
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

The first day of December means that the end of the year is staring straight at us as we plunge into the holiday season, but here at phpBB Weekly, we prefer to plunge into another tutorial.

After wishing happy birthday to phpBB team members Paul and Anon, we dissect through the release announcement of phpBB3 RC8, which was announced just hours before this episode. And, as usual, we ask the same question that everyone has been asking since May: will this RC go golden master, or is there yet another RC coming down Santa Claus lane?

This week also saw the execution of the MOD Database Cleanup. We take a look at why and how it was done, and learn a bit about Douglas’ early MODding life in the process.

Finally, David guides us through a mini-tutorial on registration settings and usergroups in phpBB3. For more information on usergroups in particular, check out the Group management and Permissions sections of the phpBB3 documentation, or check out the Custom usergroups Flash tutorial.

The MOD of the Week is Vote Manager for phpBB2 by soapergem, and the Style of the Week is Christmas for phpBB2 by CyberAlien.

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