phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:40:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and special guest Bernard Meldonado

Disclaimer: We’re still trying to get used to uStream! Unfortunately, the audio for David and Bernard got double-recorded (as we found out after the fact), and we spent a lot of time trying to fix it to no avail. We’re quite disappointed about this considering how wonderful this episode was, but the sound isn’t awful. It just adds some space-agey reverb. We’ll try to avoid this problem in the future, and sorry for the inconvenience on this episode.

Last week, we briefly spent some time discussing CAPTCHAs and their effect on people who are visually impaired. Well, for this episode, we are joined by Bernard Meldonado, the founder of Solona, a volunteer-driven website that helps solve CAPTCHAs for such visually impaired users. In our extended conversation with him, we discuss the state of CAPTCHAs from a blind person’s perspective, the lameness of audio-based CAPTCHAs (with funny examples), and discuss some other services and laws to help make the web accessible. We also discuss a bit about what we would like to see in future phpBB CAPTCHA plugins (any MOD authors listening?), and really consider the future of CAPTCHAs from an accessibility standpoint. And Bernard tells us a lot about Solona and how it operates. If you’ve got some free time to spend and want to help make a difference, we really encourage you to volunteer for Solona and help solve CAPTCHAs! (We have not yet determined if solving that many CAPTCHAs improves or degrades the quality of your eyesight.)

We also cover the recent news of the week, including the phpBB 3.0.6 RC-3 release and the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition results.

Our Poll Question is “If you were to add a step to the MOD validation workflow, what would it be?” and continues until October 31. What are you waiting for? Go vote!

The MODs of the Week are Fancy jQuery Captcha by mtotheikle and Sortables CAPTCHA Plugin by Derky. The Style of the Week is Afterburner by RocketTheme.

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Episode Duration: 1:01:08
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and some unexpected guests (hint hint)

We’re back for another episode of phpBB Weekly with Douglas hobbling along via Skype on his iPod touch as he marks three weeks since the damage of his beloved MacBook. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, even if that makes him sound like he’s on a digitized cell phone. So what, this is phpBB Weekly, we should be used to funny-sounding audio by now, right?

However, you’re definitely going to want to give a listen to this episode to hear the unexpected (and completely unplanned) surprise that puts Douglas on the spot towards the end of the show. We actually re-recorded the end of this show last Monday (which was Douglas’ 18th birthday), since the end of the live recording we did on Saturday turned out very badly due to technical problems. So even if you listened in live, you didn’t get to hear it, so be sure you take a listen!

After apologizing and explaining his difficulties in getting episode #122 released, Douglas and David take a look at the newly-released second RC of phpBB 3.0.6, which includes regression fixes from RC1, and also introduces some major changes to phpBB’s auto-updater to allow it to be more tolerant of potential conflicts with MODs. Quite frankly, the developers have made quite a few more checkins in the few days since RC2, that we wouldn’t be surprised if we see a third release candidate before 3.0.6 goes final. But we’ll just have to wait and see…

The other big release of the weekend is MODX 1.2.3, the “toasted motherboard” edition. As this is the first release to the MODX spec in the past eight months, Douglas and David take the opportunity to dust off their ongoing conversation about MODX, and its usability and purpose compared to the gone-but-not-yet-forgotten Text Template. Also, Douglas’ experiences doing phpBB Weekly without a computer have brought a bug with phpBB3′s print view to his attention, which he will report as soon as phpBB.com lets him log in again.

The MOD of the Week is Board3 Portal by avaren, and the Style of the Week is 1thank by gokinstudio.com.

There will not be a phpBB Weekly episode this Saturday, October 3rd. We will return live on October 10, and Douglas will hopefully be back in front of a normal computer by then.

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Episode Duration: 1:38:06
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

Well, we had kind of an interesting setup on this episode. Douglas recently broke his laptop, and ended up calling in using Skype on his new iPod touch. This left him unable to see the uStream chat room, or to browse ANY websites at all for that matter, aside from those that he had printed out in advance. On the flip side, David wound up impersonating Douglas on uStream in order to control the live stream. And Douglas’ lack of a laptop is the primary reason why this episode, which was recorded a week ago, took so long to get released (our sincerest apologies for that).

Anyway, our one and only topic for this episode is phpBB 3.0.6 Release Candidate 1 which was unexpectedly made available in a public release a week before this recording. The release announcement offers a HUGE list of over 150 new features, changes, and bugfixes since 3.0.5, making you wonder how on earth the Development Team squeezed so many things into this release over a time period of just over three months. The length of that list also equivocates with the length of this episode, where we really did spend over an hour and a half discussing that one topic.

But in the course of the show, not only do we go through the major new features of 3.0.6 once again, but Douglas comes up with a creative competition between David and Phil to go through the lists of “minor feature additions” and “smaller changes.” They also spend a bit more time discussing the 3.0.6 release in relation to phpBB’s recent development changes and new versioning scheme.

Our last poll question was “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” Here are the results:
“A tool that says ‘YOU IDIOT!’ if the phpBB installation hasn’t been updated in over a year.” 6 votes / 46%
“A coffee maker. (Because Erik Frerejean wouldn’t have it any other way.)” 4 votes / 31%
“An animated version of Marshalrusty’s “DON’T PANIC!” avatar.” 2 votes / 15%
“A Staples Easy Button.” 1 vote / 8%
“Sanitize (sanitise) anonymous users — as in it automatically eliminates insane anonymous users.” 0 votes / 0%
Total Votes: 13

The MOD of the Week is Simple Profile Comments by platinum_2007, and the Style of the Week is CA Halcyon by CyberAlien.

Want to help Douglas replace his broken computer, or are you interested in the Linux workstation he won from OSCON? Check out the eBay auction!

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Episode Duration: 51:40
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and John Wells (Jhong)

We’re joined on this episode by John Wells (Jhong), the guy behind the WP-United project, an integration between WordPress and phpBB3. He joins us all the way from Shanghai, China, where it is after midnight during this episode. And, courtesy of the Chinese government, we have a little bit of audio quality fun along the way, along with an unexpected encounter with a cheesy arrangement of “Ode to Joy.”

But I digress. John tells us all about WP-United, including why he started it, some of its history, some of its very interesting features (such as the ability to “blend” WordPress and phpBB elements on the same page), and how an administrator would get it to work. We also discuss a little bit about programming the integration for phpBB2 vs. phpBB3, and compare it to phpBB3′s Hook System which makes other integrations like the RokBridge-Joomla! integration possible.

Then, Micheal takes the opportunity to go over the phpBB Support Toolkit, which just had its first RC release this week. This is sure to be a very powerful and useful tool once it goes final, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it on this show.

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll was “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” There were 35 votes cast, shattering our previous record of 20. Here’s the results:
10 votes (29%) for an “Automatic idiot user filter.”
6 votes (17%) for a “Rocket launcher (David’s suggestion).”
6 votes (17%) for “A front that doesn’t fall off.”
5 votes (14%) for a “Coffee maker. (Take that, Starbucks!)”
3 votes (9%) for “The kitchen sink.”
3 votes (9%) for “Insurance from Paul’s continuous slapping.”
And 2 other votes (6%): “no new features!” and “Nicole Scherzinger”.

Our new poll is “What would be the most likely impact of enabling Quick Reply on your board?” Vote in this poll in the sidebar on the right; this poll will be open until Saturday, July 11.

The MOD of the Week is User Notes/Warnings in Viewtopic by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is AcidTech Tiger by CyberAlien.

And, credits for the closing bonus goes to a Muppet interpretation of “Ode to Joy”.

Remember that there will not be a live episode next weekend due to the 4th of July holiday (in the United States); our next live episode will be on July 11th.

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Episode Duration: 1:09:07
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Jordan Lewis (Hank the Cowdog, representing Albertie Einstein)

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The era of change must be upon us. Not only did Barack Obama get elected as the next American president, but the changes within the phpBB teams just keep on coming with each passing week. This week it was announced that Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic) is stepping down as Support Team leader (but is staying as a member of the Support Team) and will be replaced by Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty). We briefly discuss this announcement, and there’s word that there could still be more structural changes coming soon to the phpBB project; stay tuned…

In the more immediate future, however, phpBB 3.0.3 RC-1 has been sent out to the QA Team for testing, which means that the long-awaited next update to phpBB3 is likely on the way very soon. Why is it long-awaited? There’s actually a number of new features coming in this release, such as template inheritance, changes to the moderation queue, and new permissions for sending private messages to multiple recipients. We go through the new toys coming in this next release in detail.

Finally, our President Bertie contest has officially ended with two elections that were held during the week, and on this episode, we announce the winner of the Bertie Mons Presidential Election: Albertie Einstein of the Intellectual Party, sponsored by Hank the Cowdog! We perform Albertie Einstein’s inauguration ceremony live on the show, and Jordan (Hank the Cowdog) delivers an inaugural address as well. The contest may be over, but Bertie Mons will continue to thrive on StarTrekGuide. Oh, and if anyone has figured out where the good people at SCOFF Media have disappeared to, please let us know…

The MOD of the Week is Activation Justification by TerraFrost and the Style of the Week is 4poziomSEO_orange by gokin.

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