phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:23:15
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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We had a lot of things to be happy about on this episode of phpBB Weekly: not only was there a large amount of news for us to cover, but it was the one-year anniversary of the release of phpBB 3.0.0 Gold, which put us in an excited mood (enough to make a few people in the chat room question us about whether or not we were sober).

In a somewhat surprising move, phpBB 3.0.4 was released on Friday, exactly one month after the release of 3.0.3, marking a major shift change as the Development Team begins focusing on making subsequent revisions of phpBB3 less, um, “huge” than 3.0.3 was. We cover the fixes, changes, and the one new feature in-depth, as usual.

David gives a grand welcome to this week’s new team members: two more Support Team members, and one new MOD Team member who was promoted from the Junior Validators Team. David also gives us a bit of an update on how the Junior Validators have been doing and a glimpse of where the idea will be heading.

Earlier this week, Meik (AcydBurn) that PHP 5.2.7 posed a security risk for phpBB2, due to an issue that PHP 5.2.7 caused with “magic_quotes_gpc.” We take a look at this risk in more detail, including why this affected phpBB2 but not phpBB3, and we also discuss why PHP 5.2.7 was retracted in the first place.

Finally, voting in the phpBBHacks.com 2008 Awards is almost over, so we take a look at the MODs/hacks, styles/templates, phpBB boards, and their authors up for the award.

The MOD of the Week is Annual Stars by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is MG Xmas by Mighty Gorgon.

In honor of one of David’s favorite songs (as we discovered midway through this episode), the closing music is Black Horse and the Cherry Tree — KT Tunstall.

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Episode Duration: 48:21
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Londonvasion 2008 Discussion Panel (Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Kenny Cameron (cherokee red), Eric Faerber (wGEric), DavidMJ), and Londonvasion 2008 Attendees

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On this special episode of phpBB Weekly, we held a live stream of the Question & Answer Team Member Panel Discussion session taking place at Londonvasion 2008. A panel of team members answered various questions from the Londonvasion audience, from the phpBB IRC channels, and most of all, from the phpBB Weekly live audience. This quality wasn’t the best (had a number of technical difficulties to get the stream to work at all), but nevertheless, this was certainly an interesting session to be a part of. Listen in on this exclusively-special episode of phpBB Weekly!

Thanks in particular to David Lewis, Paul Sohier, Yuriy Rusko, and Eric Faerber for helping us get through the technical issues on the London side of this episode.

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Episode Duration: 39:21
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

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IMPORTANT! Contrary to what was said on this episode, we are still going to be doing our live episode streaming from Londonvasion as planned.

This episode, however, did not go according to plan, due to the fact that the team members had an important presentation to be at that conflicted with this live episode, and the London hotel that they were staying at had a miserably poor internet connection. (The hotel has promised that there will be a much, much better connection at Londonvasion, according to an e-mail David sent awhile after this episode ended.) So Douglas, left by himself, tried to fill for time by discussing some of the team member photos from Londonvasion and covering what will be discussed at Londonvasion based on the finalized schedule.

In addition, voting in the phpBBHacks.com Idol has begun, and Douglas explains how the voting will work and who is up against who. Go help determine who will win all of the fabulous prizes and their own library of books (not to mention the ever-important bragging rights)!

Finally, on the request of the ever-helpful chat room on TalkShoe, Douglas summarizes the latest MOD team post on the blog concerning MOD author feedback and how they handle it.

The MOD of the Week is Advanced Meta Tags by Drugs, and the Style of the Week is Getaway by CyberAlien.

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We’ve been talking about wanting to do this for some time; now it’s official. For a special episode of phpBB Weekly happening on Sunday, July 20, we will be streaming part of the Londonvasion conference live! In a phpBB Weekly exclusive, we’ll be broadcasting the “Open panel discussion, question and answer led by the phpBB Team Members” at 4 PM London time, which is 11:00 AM EDT/15:00 UTC (view local time) via our chatroom on TalkShoe.

Although we will be primarily streaming the session (and so any discussion taking place between ourselves will not be heard by the Londonvasion attendees), our own David Lewis will be listening in and keeping an eye on our live chat room, and so if you have a question that you would like to ask the team members, there’s a good chance that David will be able to relay your question over to the team members and you’ll be able to have your question answered. Plus, this will be the only part of Londonvasion being streamed live in any form, so this will be a great chance for those of you unable to attend Londonvasion to listen in and participate in what could very well be one of its most interesting sessions.

We hope that you’ll plan to join us live (or else stream it via the badge on our site) for this exciting special episode of phpBB Weekly, and please share this announcement with anyone else who would be interested!

And of course, be sure to check out Londonvasion Central for lots more complete coverage of Londonvasion.

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Download MP3 Episode (43 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:15:09
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Eric Faerber (wGEric)

Eric Faerber returns for his second appearance on phpBB Weekly, and one which probably is a bit more informative than his first appearance was (and the blame for that can go directly to Douglas). It’s also the day after Douglas’ birthday, and so we do a short celebration for him as well. We also do our best to run the show while phpBB.com is down for “unexpected maintenance”, and we also launch a new feature on this episode: the phpBB Weekly Trivia Question.

During the interview with Eric, David mentions a few more new Support Team members, and mentions that Acyd Burn has confirmed that there will be an RC-6 release coming. We also take a look at the new hooks system that was recently added into CVS and will be coming out with phpBB3 RC-6 and ask what it means for MODs, and Douglas reiterates his wish for a WordPressish plugin system for the MODding of the future. We also talk about other new things for MODs in phpBB3, and then ask Eric some user-submitted questions about the MOD Team. Eric also reveals a couple of details of the upcoming EasyMOD for phpBB3 (Codename: Blinky).

Since phpBB.com was down, we had to take our MOD and Style of the Week off of Star Trek Guide, which is probably the best alternative. Anyway, the MOD of the Week is PM Alert Layer for phpBB3 by angelside, and the Style of the Week is Aqua Glass for phpBB3 by Trent.

Incidentally, if you would like to send your birthday wishes to Douglas, the Star Trek Guide folks have already setup a topic for that.

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