phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:26:48
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Okay, so it’s not all-new and it probably won’t blow your mind (not in a good way, at least), but nevertheless, phpBB Weekly is back! With a new presence on uStream, a new timezone, and (for Douglas) a new “studio” and a new operating system, it could be called all-new, except that we still have the same outlook on life. And the same tendency to talk, and talk, and talk.

On the phpBB news front, the second release candidate of the phpBB Support Toolkit is out now, and it’s also the first release to be officially supported and recommended for use. The deadline for the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition has been extended to this Friday, and we will be covering it in much more depth next week.

In the “At what point will they quit tinkering and finally get a ‘gold master’ label out” category, development of the much-anticipated 3.0.6 release continues and more new features continue to be inserted. David and Douglas focus on two significant additions on this episode: the Newly Registered Users Group (to make it easier for moderators and administrators to observe the actions of newly registered users to ensure that they aren’t tending towards spam), and Submitting Statistics to phpBB.com (to optionally and anonymously submit usage and server statistics to the phpBB Development Team).

Finally, David and Douglas spend some time recapping our interview with Lorelle VanFossen by bringing the discussion about helping to bring around more community events and meetups into the phpBB community. We cover a range of thoughts on what the phpBB teams and community members can do to help phpBB reach out beyond its own online community.

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” The poll will start in the next day or two on the right sidebar, and will end on September 12.

The MOD of the Week is IE6 No More by VSE, and the Style of the Week is Blue Stripe by BlackburnRavers.

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Episode Duration: 1:32:27
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), Erik Frerejean (erikfrerejean), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman)

Just because we’re all busy for the 4th of July holiday, doesn’t mean we can’t warm it up with a bang the night before! We got as big of a crowd together as we could for this fire-crackling episode of phpBB Weekly–which wasn’t live, allowing us to pull off a few stunts.

We start by taking another look at the Support Toolkit which hit its first release candidate a little over a week ago. Erik, who helped build the Support Toolkit, gave us a nice rundown of what the Toolkit does and what it’s goals are. Phil also wanted us to give some love (which Douglas took a little literally) to his Support Request Template Generator, which makes it quite a bit easier to submit a support request following the template. If you haven’t heard, it’s a good idea to use the Support Request Template.

David gives us a sneak preview of the Coffee Maker MOD that he’s planning for phpBB 3.2, which will require the USBWine attachment. Whether it’s USBWine or BBCoffee, Douglas probably won’t be satisfied until he can get root beer through a spout over the internet.

[20:44:03] * DavidIQ gags FountainOfApples
[20:44:30] <FountainOfApples> with the phpBB coffee, right?
[20:44:36] <FountainOfApples> that stuff is the worst brew ever
[20:44:42] <FountainOfApples>
[20:46:13] <DavidIQ> well that was while Highway|Away was doing it…American coffee is just blah

The blog post CAPTCHA Plugins and You discusses the new CAPTCHA plugins architecture coming in phpBB 3.0.6, and we look at the announcement in-depth, including what it will mean for style authors, MOD authors, and end users (after some transition, pure spambot-free heaven).

Finally, Douglas talks about a new book he’s been reading, Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. He talks about his experiences and thoughts after converting one of his projects over to OOP mode, and David and Francis promptly scare him again with more technical talk, but overall, we do have a bit of an interesting discussion about the merits of OOP vs. procedural programming. Finally, we all take our best crack and pronouncing Paamayim Nekudotayim, the true name of PHP’s scope resolution operator, and a fancy Hebrew name for “double colon” (::). As if programmers weren’t busy enough.
Overall, Douglas says that he did learn a bit from the book and that it helped make OOP more approachable, but he noted that really only the first two or three chapters are applicable to beginners, and criticized it for breezing through more complex code examples without much explanation, and for an obvious lack of proofreading.

There was no MOD or Style of the Week this week. Credits for this week’s musical escapades go to God Bless the USA – The Hit Crew and Stand Up Comedy – U2. Be sure to join us next Saturday, when we return live to the TalkShoe airwaves!

[20:58:41] <leviatan21> I think all of you are insane !!!
[21:02:25] <DavidIQ> that’s a requirement to be a coder

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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.