phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:31:34
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Nils Adermann (naderman), and Brad Baker

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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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Episode Duration: 51:31
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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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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Episode Duration: 50:31
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Scott Stubblefield

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…

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

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Episode Duration: 1:46:26
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and David M. (DavidMJ)

We thought that we were going to do this episode of phpBB Weekly on Skypecasts, but we encountered problems with their service that made TalkShoe feel like the utopia of live audio streaming, so we decided to move back, and indeed, a brand new bugfixed update of TalkShoe was waiting for us. After spending some time talking about our interesting phpBB Weekly plight, congratulating David’s brother Francis Lewis (Handyman) for becoming a MOD Team member (the first time when two brothers have both been on the teams!), and talking about the recent Joomla!-phpBB meetup, we welcomed phpBB Developer DavidMJ as special guest for the show.

With DavidMJ, we talk about some of the many changes in phpBB3 over phpBB2, particularly in the areas of security and the improved accessibility of the codebase for MOD and style authors. DavidMJ also tells us about his particular areas of expertise in phpBB3, the database management system (DBMS). We also discuss the question over phpBB2′s fate, how much longer phpBB3 will support PHP 4, and some technical info on the various optimizations in phpBB3, and much more.

The MOD of the Week is Instant Post Redirect for phpBB3 by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Holiday Style for phpBB3 by Echo. (Yes, we did unintentionally pick styles from the same author on two consecutive episodes.)
Also, as the holiday season gets closer, we’re asking you to recommend any holiday-related MODs and Styles to us to feature on the upcoming episodes of phpBB Weekly. If you have one to recommend, bookmark it on del.icio.us with the tag “phpbbwmod” or “phpbbwstyle” and we’ll consider promoting it on the show.

Editor’s Note: Apologies for the time it took to release this episode. I was having some difficulties getting my editing software to work properly until Apple pushed out an updated release which fixed everything. I look forward to when we’ll stop having technical difficulties on this podcast!

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

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Episode Duration: 1:25:40
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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.