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We return from our three week break energized and ready to go with our fall “season” of phpBB Weekly, and we kick it off with the realization that there’s a whole bunch of news for us to cover from just the past few days.

The MOD and Styles Databases have been upgraded with the ability to subscribe to individual MOD updates by e-mail (and, according to Paul, there’s a secret RSS feed as well). Speaking of the databases, thirteen phpBB3 styles have finally been approved for the Styles Database. In addition, the Styles Team has announced a new styles validation policy regarding how they will handle new releases of phpBB and how it will affect style validation. The Londonvasion videos are now available as well, and David shares some of his recommendations for the best ones to watch if you don’t have time for all of them.

The MOD Team will be holding its third annual MOD Authors Convention next Saturday, August 30 in the #phpbb-mod IRC channel. We briefly describe what sessions will be presented at the convention on this episode, and will be providing complete live coverage of the convention on next week’s episode. And finally, PHP 4.4.9 has been released, signifying the last release of PHP 4 as the PHP Group drops support for it, plus PHP 5.3 is in early release candidate stage, and we discuss some of the development team’s recent changes in the Subversion repository in response to the new version of PHP.

We then bring you a tutorial on the ways you can optimze search engine optimization (SEO) in phpBB3, from our local SEO expert, David Lewis, whose blog post on SEO and phpBB3 just appeared on the phpBB.com Blog.

Links from the SEO Tutorial and Other Recommended SEO Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
SEO MOD
Advanced Meta Tags MOD
What are Google Sitemaps?

This week’s MOD and Style of the Week are the winners of the recent phpBBHacks.com Idol (which means that these two authors won over $1200 worth of prizes for their products!). The winning hack/MOD is Log Connections by Elglobo and the winning style is Soul City by Abble CoSa NoStrA.

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Now that we’ve emerged from Londonvasion, we came on this episode still a bit hungover from the excitement of the event, and a little but unsure of what to cover, so we decided to talk about some of the latest news from phpBB.com, not expecting that the episode would turn out to be as long as it did. We’re also joined on this episode by Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), the Support Team leader.

The phpBB Discussion forums have been reorganized into one basic, general phpBB Discussion forum. We talk about what the change means and some of the reasons why it was implemented.

Then, there’s a new post on the phpBB.com Blog about template inheritance, a new feature coming in phpBB 3.0.3 based on some requests that originated at Londonvasion, and provides a way for style authors to simplify their styles by basing portions of them on other templates (like prosilver or subsilver2, for example). We talk a bit about template inheritance and describe how it will work.

Finally, for a topic that David requested, we discuss an ongoing discussion on the phpBB.com forums relating to the recent blog post on MOD Author feedback. We cover some of the issues that were brought up in this discussion and talk about how the MOD team should and better communicate with the MOD community, and some of the other documentation, ongoing projects, and tools that the MOD team is working on to help out MOD authors. The MOD team continues to accept feedback on the MOD Database and the validation process.

The MOD of the Week is RedBar3 by cherokee red, and the Style of the Week IS AeroBlue by jrolson.

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Editor’s Note: Yes, we’re going a little out of order here, but between Douglas being in China and David being in Vancouver, we haven’t had the chance to catch up and get ahold of the recording of #065. We’ll try to have it out by the end of the week. Thank you for your patience.

This special episode of phpBB Weekly focused on discussion of phpBB’s relationship with Joomla! and how it has developed into the RokBridge integration between the two products. For the first half of the show, Douglas is joined by phpBB Developer Nils Adermann (naderman) who talks about how Joomla! and phpBB came together, how the relationship has grown and progressed, and about how the RokBridge project has developed and what it means for the future of both projects.

We also ran into some extra time, and took advantage of it to discuss the opening of the Styles Database, MODX 1.2.0, an early look at the upcoming 3.0.2 release, and some of the latest things checked into the Ascraeus SVN development.

Then, for the second half of the show, David joins us live from the Joomla!Day event in Vancouver during his lunch break, in which he talks a bit more about the phpBB-Joomla! relationship and about some of the things that have been taking place at the event. He also introduces us to Brad Baker, one of the Joomla! Core Team members. He’ll fully recap his experiences from the event on our next episode.

The MOD of the Week is Viewtopic Birthday for phpBB3 by eviL<3. There is no Style of the Week this week (because, as you hear on the show, the style databases that Douglas tried to connect to were down!).

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On this episode, we were expecting to be joined by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/bbPress/Automattic, but he didn’t make it to the episode. Instead, this episode primarily is the culmination of our attempts to stall for time in the hopes that Matt might make it. As we pass the time, we have a Picky Correction of the Week segment to correct some of the comments that David made last week about the phpBB.com Styles Demo. David also talks briefly about the phpBB team’s upcoming involvement at LinuxTag, and about his plans to go to Joomla! Day Vancouver (more on that coming soon).

The MOD of the Week is Activity Stats MOD for phpBB3 by Highway of Life (and he also unveiled an exclusive premiere of what’s coming soon for the MOD), and the Style of the Week is Grand Theft Auto 4 for phpBB3 by John Olson.

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The jury was out on whether or not we would be able to recover from our, um, interesting episode last weekend, but we came around with a somewhat more serious episode this week. This episode featured our tenth guest interview in this podcast’s short history, and represents our response to the many comments that we have received from our listeners recently asking for us to focus a bit more on styles for phpBB.

On this episode, we were joined by phpBB style author Scott Stubblefield, who makes some of our favorite styles for phpBB2 and for phpBB3. On this episode, Scott tells us about how he got into making phpBB styles, his experiences as a style author transitioning from phpBB2 to phpBB3, tips for users interested in making phpBB styles, and much more. Plus, David answers a frequently asked question regarding how long it will be before the phpBB.com Styles Database finally comes back online.

The MOD of the Week is Quick reply for phpBB3 by rxu, and the Style of the Week is Star Trek for phpBB3 by Scott Stubblefield.

Be sure to join us next week when we will have a very special surprise topic that will be sure to knock your socks off…

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