phpBB Weekly

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download AAC Episode (40.8 MB) | Download MP3 Episode (79.5 MB)
Sorry, no chat log this time! We haven’t figure out the best way to log the uStream chatroom yet…

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (84.6 MB) | Download Episode Chat Log

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (45.7 MB)

Episode Duration: 49:55
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

This episode of phpBB Weekly is dedicated to phpBB supporters everywhere. (But no, there isn’t actually any chicken soup involved; we left the food behind with BBGourmet a few weeks ago.) Instead we’re joined by frequent phpBB Weekly guest Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), Support Team Leader. Along with Micheal (veteran Support Team Leader), we have quite an interesting discussion.

We start by talking about JimA’s recent post on the phpBB.com Blog discussing why being a phpBB supporter is a rewarding experience as well as some things that you need to know before you start supporting. Yuriy and Micheal share some of the Support Team’s perspective on what they do to oversee community phpBB supporters and ensure that the Support Forums are a productive place.

Yuriy then overviews the Support Toolkit, which was recently made available for public preview via the phpBB Codeforge. The Support Toolkit will eventually become a tool that will be able to automatically perform a number of troubleshooting tools semi-independently of a properly-functioning phpBB installation. It is definitely a project that we will continue to keep a close eye on at phpBB Weekly.

Our last poll question was “What should be featured on the next episode of BBGourmet (if there ever is one)?” The top choice was “Deck 15 Donuts” with 5 votes (45%), although you know that David probably voted for that one multiple times, including once during this particular episode. Second choice was “Some poisonous recipe with vBulletin added to it” with 4 votes (36%). There was 1 vote (9%) for “User Permissions Parfaits,” 1 vote (9%) for “Yummy Apple-Blueberry Bars (YaBB),” and 0 votes for “Invision Power Brownies.” This week’s poll question is “What’s the most important advice to give a phpBB supporter?” and the poll will end on May 9th. Vote in the sidebar on the right-hand side.

The MOD of the Week is easyPortal by Noxwizard, and the Style of the Week is Pro_ubuntu by Ishimaru Chiaki.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (82.9 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:12:25
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

Sponsor: Online meetings made easy. Try GotoMeeting FREE for 30 days! www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/

NOTE: These show notes do not contain as many links as we would like them to due to the phpBB.com outage. We will add more links where appropriate once phpBB.com is back.

Douglas was at a conference in San Francisco during this episode, and you know what that means: David brings on guest team members to help him out. He was joined on this episode by Paul of the MOD Team, Francis Lewis (Handyman) of the MOD Team and StarTrekGuide, and Michael Williams (mtotheikle), Development Leader of StarTrekGuide. And the topic of discussion? Our well-known favorite topic of discussion–MODs.

First off, MODX 1.2.2 and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 have been simultaneously released. MODX 1.2.2 mainly contains a number of XSL fixes and tweaks, and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 includes a few new features and a number of bugfixes. The four of them also discuss some of their favorite MODs, take a look at some of the biggest MODs for phpBB3 and phpBB2, and chat about how MODding has evolved from phpBB2 to phpBB3.

February 1st marked the last day that the Development Team would release security patches for phpBB2, thus ending any and all support for phpBB2. It also marked the last day that any phpBB2 submissions would be accepted into the MODs Database. We talk about the ending of security patches as well as discuss how long it would take for very large boards to upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3. Finally, they also discuss the recent blog post on phpBB.com discussing why team members don’t give private support to users.

Last week’s poll question, “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?”, is still open and will run through Saturday, February 7. So go vote!
The MOD of the Week is Mods Database by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is Hermes by CyberAlien.

Be sure to join us next week when we will have a special edition phpBB Weekly episode with featured discussion of the ongoing phpBB.com outage, joined by members of the phpBB teams who have been busy this week rebuilding the site.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (42.6 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:14:52
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

This weekend, we mark phpBB Weekly’s second anniversary (that right, can you believe we’ve been doing this for two years now?) and the beginning of the year 2009. But that also brings with it some other news, which may or may not be disappointing depending on your point of view: phpBB2 has been officially retired and support for phpBB2 has ended. We take a look at the end of support announcement and look down the road and discuss how phpBB2 will be further phased out over the next few weeks and months. And Douglas is once again very disappointed about the news, while David tries to tell him to get over it.

However, if you didn’t already notice, we launched a new website for ourselves, and so we spend a bit of the beginning of the episode reviewing what has changed on our website and on our podcast, as well as providing a glimpse of some further changes that may be coming down the road.

The MOD Team continues to make waves with the announcement that the MPV (MOD pre-validator) source code has been released in the MODX Tools repository of the phpBB Code Forge, plus it can now run on any site without the need to have phpBB installed. We discuss the reasons for releasing the MPV source and David also attempts to describe some of the other tools under development in the MODX Tools repository. He couldn’t remember all of them, however, so we’ll probably make some corrections next week.

Finally, there will be a phpBB Meeting in Scotland, UK on Saturday, January 24th. We discuss a bit of the activities that will be happening there; we’re not sure yet if we’ll be doing anything special in connection with the meetup on the 24th or not, so stay tuned. Plus, Douglas has decided to do something about his own pipe dreams and has posted a topic looking for interest in a San Francisco phpBB conference/meetup this summer, and David and Douglas discuss some of the logistics of that, if it happens. Plus, Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic) also shares some perspective on both of these via the chat room.

The MOD of the Week is Prime Birthdate Require by primehalo, and the Style of the Week is Revolution by Semi_Deus. Also, our first-ever phpBB Weekly poll question for this week is “What do you think of the new phpBB Weekly website?” Vote in the poll on the right sidebar on our website, and we’ll evaluate the responses to the poll on our next episode.

2009 is here, and we’re ready for another great year of phpBB Weekly! Thanks for listening, as always.