It’s been about three and a half months now since phpBB3’s gold release rocked the galaxy, and so now the hype has simmered down and the devs have rested up and the first big wave of post-release bug reports have rolled in. So now, three and a half months after the release, the Development Team has been working hard on the inevitable 3.0.1 release.

Confirming what David has promised us for these past few months, the Dev Team will be quietly issuing “quality assurance” release candidates of every minor release in an effort to avoid repeating instances of having to issue a new release within days of a previous one (as happened twice in the 2.0.x line and once during phpBB3’s RC stage). Anyone can help themselves to these release candidates (and the QA “Quack and Assassinate” Team will be forced to dive through them), and they will likely materialize into a full version of phpBB 3.0.1 by the end of the week. There will be a mailing list to subscribe to if you want to help test out release candidates when they come out (they will not normally be published on the announcements forum to the general community). As a reminder, while the RCs are not fully complete, the chances are that they will fix more problems than they cause; the purpose of the QA testing is to ensure that they don’t introduce any significant new problems.

So far, the list of changes for 3.0.1 features fifty bugfixes–it’s obvious that the dev teams have been busy, in addition to their recent release of 2.0.23 plus working on the development of Ascraeus.

We have been planning something special for this Saturday’s episode of phpBB Weekly, and thus, we will not be able to discuss phpBB 3.0.1 on our show this week. However, this is just a note to you to keep an eye out for the new release and update! (You know, I hear that the new auto-updater is like super-easy and totally rocks!) If you’re interested in helping to test out the release candidates, feel free to help yourself.

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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.

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This after-Thanksgiving episode of phpBB Weekly was interesting because we hadn’t really planned as much for the episode as we should have because we were busier planning for Thanksgiving, however through debates, discussion, and question answering, we were able to take a single, short topic and extended it out to make an entire show, to our surprise.

We start the show by giving our birthday wishes to David, whose birthday will be on Monday, November 26th, and we also go over some of the new features of phpBB Weekly’s website.

Following a recent announcement on Star Trek Guide in which David updated to a CVS version of phpBB3, we question him on his motives. It turns out that there will be an eighth release candidate for phpBB3 which will be coming out very soon. We discuss the new release a bit and also take a look at what it means for the timing of the final release. As the show lingers on, we end up having a bit of a heated discussion about phpBB3 vs. phpBB2, and we also talk a bit about phpBB3’s release cycle after 3.0.0 “Olympus” is released.

Additional links mentioned: phpBB 3.x Feature Tracker, Google Webmaster Tools

The MOD of the Week is Evil Quick Reply for phpBB3 by eviL<3 and the Style of the Week is Vista for phpBB3 by HelterSkelter.

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

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This episode did not go according to plan. We had expected to have phpBB Developer DavidMJ on as a guest today, but unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a family emergency and was unable to make it, so we ended up coming together with a pretty good show while we stalled and took comments from our live listeners (six of whom were phpBB team members!). This episode was recorded right before the release of phpBB3 RC-6 and the ensuing chaos that has followed the release, which you can read a bit about in the previous post on this blog, and which will be discussed more thoroughly on next week’s episode. We do hope to try to bring DavidMJ on sometime in November, with more details coming soon.

In this episode we talk a bit about the phpBB Security Team and Incident Investigation Team and about what those teams do, and also briefly discuss some common security vulnerabilities common in PHP code that both the developers and MOD authors need to look out for. We do a little bit more coverage of the just-about-to-be-released RC-6, and wander off for a few minutes into a discussion of Mac security vs. Windows security. (It’s not as bad as you might think.) Then, Jeffro calls in and asks us to talk a bit more about just how private private messaging is, and we also talk about changes in phpBB3 styles vs. phpBB2 styles and possible enhancements to phpBB MODding in the long-term future.

The MOD of the Week is Notify Admin on Registration for phpBB3 by ameeck, and the Style of the Week is Playstation for phpBB3 by Scott Stubblefield.

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

phpBB 3.0.RC6, probably the most hyped release candidate of phpBB so far (and definitely the one release that we’ve talked about more than any other on our show), was just released this afternoon. (Or, if you’re in Europe/Asia, it was released last night.) What’s so significant about this particular release is that it arguably includes the most changes/new features to the phpBB3 codebase since UTF-8 support arrived in Beta3, back last November. (David covered many of these features on episode #033, and we also discussed a few of these on today’s episode #034, which will be released really soon.)

It was also revealed that the phpBB3 codebase security audit was done by independent software security company SektionEins. Their website indicates that they specialize in security audits for web applications, in particular for those based on PHP. Their site also lists a number of stats about Internet attacks, and on episode #034 we talked a bit about some common vulnerabilities that web applications suffer. One of the reasons that phpBB has a bad reputation for security is because many hosts are using much much older versions of phpBB2 that have serious vulnerabilities in them. The phpBB teams over the years have been very good at getting new, fixed releases out in a timely matter, and the majority of the fault for these exploits are forum admins who don’t keep phpBB2 up-to-date, but nevertheless, the phpBB teams have been unfairly blamed many times for these. By having a codebase audit prior to Olympus going gold, phpBB3 will hopefully have a better lifetime than phpBB2 did.

However, Acyd Burn mentioned that the security audit turned up zero SQL injection vulnerabilities and zero Command Code Execution (CCE) vulnerabilities, which is excellent news and really exemplifies some of phpBB3’s superiority to phpBB2 when it comes to security. Considering that there’s over 200,000 lines of code in phpBB3, this is an excellent accomplishment and props for that goes to the Development Team. However, thanks to the security audit, RC-6 does bring along fixes for a few XSS vulnerabilities, a new password hashing mechanism, and a number of other new goodies.

Anyway, be sure that you run, don’t walk, over to the downloads page and download the RC-6 updater! The countdown to phpBB3 is getting nearer, can you feel the excitement?

UPDATE: Acyd Burn has announced that due to some problems with the RC-6 package, a new RC-7 package will be released later today. The teams will be providing auto-update packages for both RC-6 to RC-7 and RC-5 to RC-7. You probably should hold off until the new release this afternoon.
On phpBB Weekly #035, David will probably talk a bit about what happened to necessitate the RC-7 release.

If you are experiencing problems on your board with the RC-6/RC-7 update, read this article which details many problems with MODs and Styles due to the update.