phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:02:19
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

On this episode, Douglas had just gotten back from Washington, D.C., and was thawing out. (Actually, make-up work from his week-long absence is the reason why this episode took so long to get released; sorry about that.) Nevertheless, we somehow accomplished David’s continual quest for “shorter episodes” with a release that is just barely over an hour. Not too shabby. And they said it couldn’t be done.

In addition to a bit of reflection from the inauguration, we pretty much covered some of the recent news. David gave us a preview of the upcoming release of MODX 1.2.2 (which has actually now been released, but we’ll talk about that on our next episode), and then he mentioned that a new variation on phpBB’s CAPTCHA has been committed to Subversion for 3.0.5 that will allow you to add a “wave” to the CAPTCHA image. (See the before and after.) Douglas also shares some of his experiences with reCAPTCHA, a good alternative CAPTCHA service for those of you who want a CAPTCHA that’s a little bit more humane. (Anyone want to write a phpBB3 MOD for it?)

David and Douglas also cover the recent blog post on fighting CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) and the measures that phpBB takes (and MOD authors should take) to help protect against CSRF. And in passing, David also shares that a new Junior Developers Team has started, and the developers have put together a very comprehensive page on how you can get involved with phpBB development.

Last week’s Poll Question of the Week was “Do YOU think there’s a government plan to close down the internet?” There were 2 votes (16.67%) saying “Yes, there certainly is.”; 4 votes (33.33%) saying “No way, this is just a crazy conspiracy theory.”; 5 votes (41.67%) saying “The government is watching every move I make, therefore I cannot provide a definitive answer to this question.”; and 1 vote (7.14%) saying “How the heck should we know? Or care?”. This week’s poll question is “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on February 7th.

The MOD of the Week is IGN Style Colored Names by Trel, and the Style of the Week is twilightBB by Daniel Exe.

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Episode Duration: 1:18:23
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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News from the phpBB front has been somewhat limited recently, so we dug deep into our coffers to uncover some things to chat about on this “potpourri”-style episode.

David first brings up that phpBB.com has now been enhanced with some of the new features from the recently-released phpBB 3.0.3. New users on phpBB.com will now have their first post send to the moderation queue for approval, but once they have one approved post, they will then have free access to go on posting like normal. The teams are hoping that this will allow them to catch spammers more easily and ban them on sight. Speaking of banning, David also shares how much he loves the new one-click ban feature, making it possible for administrators to ban users straight from their profile.

David and Douglas than discuss a question which has been often brought up recently: “Will phpBB write/release a book?” Well, as is the case with most things from the teams, there’s no definite answer, but David and Douglas both have their own separate opinions on the subject, which they spend some time discussing.

Finally, David and Douglas talk a bit about the new request class that Nils Aderman (naderman) committed to the Ascraeus SVN repository last week, which brings a number of enhancements to phpBB3′s request_var() function, and what it means for MOD authors. They then step back and go over the importance of securing user-submitted variables in PHP in order to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities, which request_var() makes very simple for phpBB3 MOD authors. As Nils quoted in his commit log,

“Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.”

The MOD of the Week is Smilie Creator by Dr.Death, and the Style of the Week is proChristmas by topdown. If you have any suggestions for MODs or Styles to highlight on our show (particularly any holiday-themed styles), please share them with us!

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: 1:35:15
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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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.

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: 44:38
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

On the heels of last week’s accident comes another episode of phpBB Weekly, once again featuring a solo act from Douglas. On this episode, Douglas once again begs for forgiveness for the accident that caused last week’s dilemma, but also takes a second look at what was discussed last week and re-examines (as well as clarifies) the various new features in phpBB 3.2 Ascraeus. At the same time, he examines the announcement that phpBB Development is moving to Subversion, and also makes mention of the new phpBB Code Forge.

This is a short and sweet episode that may sound like a regurgitation of what was covered last week, but we try to tackle it all in a new light as we collectively take a deep breath and move on.

The MOD of the Week is Change Poster for phpBB2 by Joe Belmaati, and the Style of the Week is Jenova Template for phpBB2 by varuna.

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