phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:26:52
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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On this non-live episode of phpBB Weekly, David and Douglas go through a bunch of old news, recapping it and covering some new developments. We start by briefly mentioning the new phpBB Weekly theme/album artwork project that is in progress right now, and invite anyone who’s interested to participate.

You can now register for Londonvasion, which opened up a few weeks ago, along with a number of other details that Yuriy made available. We also (once again) do a recap on our latest plans for Londonvasion coverage, as well as answer a few questions that we’ve heard about it.

David gives us a recap on the MOD Team’s Package Manager (Blinky). In doing so, he also unveils some of the new features in the upcoming release of the MODX 1.2 spec for the first time.

Douglas and David then chat a bit about Sphinx for phpBB, another project in the phpBB Code Forge that is being put together by Development Team member Nils Adermann (naderman). Sphinx is an SQL full-text search engine that is already being used on phpBB.com and will likely be made available as an additional search plugin for a future release of phpBB3.

David then reveals that the new phpBB3 Styles Database has finally been completed and has been opened up! (The new Styles Demo only has one style in it at the moment: subsilver2.) You can now expect to start seeing styles hopefully be added to the database, and we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes open on there. We also speculate over whether or not there will end up being a Styles Demo for phpBB2 as well, but that question has yet to be answered…

And finally, we do a recap from our vBulletin Weekly April Fools joke by chatting about the recent vBulletin 3.7, which is virtually your own Facebook in a box. But since Jelsoft really knows the right way to celebrate a new release, we also take some time to discuss their simultaneous announcements of immediate end-of-life for vBulletin 3.0 and 3.5, along with end-of-life in six months for vBulletin 3.6; as well as unprecedented licensing changes (aka price increases) for vBulletin licenses. If you thought that phpBB’s end of life announcement was sudden, you probably won’t think that anymore!

The MOD of the Week is Forum Sponsor for phpBB3 by EXreaction, and the Style of the Week is VidoStyle for phpBB3 by [urban] & Shadow_One.

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

I don’t know if you’ve been by our phpBB Weekly forum recently, but a lot has been happening there recently. David and I have been discussing the idea of making phpBB Weekly’s branding a little more “Olympusy”–that is, more in tune with the phpBB3 artwork. While I have been and continue to remain to this day a big fan of the phpBB2 “hut” image that graced the phpBB.com website until March 2007, times have changed, people have upgraded, and the upcoming “end of life” of phpBB2 has shown us that it’s time that we start getting caught up.

David has designed a cool new album artwork proposal which we’re currently seeking feedback on and are considering adopting sometime in the next month or two. However, we’re also hoping to adopt a new theme for our phpBBWeekly.net website that reflects the new artwork but still has some originality. Star Trek Guide member Midnight Phoenix is custom-designing a brand new WordPress theme just for us (and donating his services as well, by the way), but he’d be interested in hearing your suggestions, particularly since David and myself only have a very short wishlist. If you’d like to contribute your comments and participate, check out the discussion topic on our forum!