phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:00:21
On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

How does one follow up the episode that we had last week, when we covered the surge of changes coming in 3.0.6? Well, for one thing, we did have the chance to hear the opinion of Mr. “We Know Where You Live, We’re Coming Now” himself, as we get Ash (NeoThermic) to give his opinion of the new quick reply coming in 3.0.6. Oh, and we did take some time to acknowledge the efforts of the Development Team to bring on new Junior Developers — combined with the full Development Team, we’re looking at the most developers phpBB has ever had at one time. Not too shabby, eh?

However, we decided to focus this show on a phpBB tutorial that we’ve never actually covered before, if you can believe that such a thing exists. We’re talking about Converting to phpBB. If you’ve got one of the Available Convertors, you can bring many other bulletin board programs (or in some cases, phpBB2 with certain MODs installed) up to phpBB3. In addition to going through how to convert a board over to phpBB3 (which is really easy, thanks to phpBB’s Unified Convertor Framework), we also overview what’s actually involved in building and maintaining a phpBB convertor.

Meanwhile, Micheal sympathizes with a Gumblar victim, and Douglas shares some new developments regarding OSCONvasion 2009. phpBB Weekly will (likely) be streaming live from OSCONvasion, on Thursday 7/23, so if you can’t join us in person, hopefully you can join in live!

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question, “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” continues through Saturday 6/27, so be sure to vote on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is AJAX Quick Edit by mac1706, and the Style of the Week is ClanzDarkness3 by Griffin.

Be sure to join us next week, when we will be joined by guest John Wells (Jhong) of the WP-United project! Share your questions for him on our forum.

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Episode Duration: 1:29:28
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

On this non-live “Anything Goes” episode, Douglas is joined by the “Spokane Clan”–David Lewis, Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle). They’re all from Spokane, all bigwigs on StarTrekGuide, and are all celebrating the retirement of phpBB2 while Douglas continues mourning it.

The main topic of conversation is the recent blog post on session integration and other ways of integrating phpBB with your website. While we (and by we, we mean David) have discussed this before, we go significantly in-depth on the subject in this episode, including integrating the sessions, auths, templates, languages, DBAL–essentially the entire framework of phpBB in order to allow your website to seamlessly integrate with phpBB. WARNING: This is one of our much more technical topics and likely not intended for the faint-hearted. Most of the things we discussed can be found as articles on the phpBB Development Wiki.

Douglas was also on WordPress Weekly the other day, and one of the topics of conversation included bridges between phpBB and other platforms (such as Joomla!, WordPress, etc.). We extend that conversation on bridges a bit as well, and we’ll go a bit more in-depth on a number of bridge solutions that have popped up during the year 2008 on upcoming episodes of phpBB Weekly.

Finally, an interesting topic on phpBB.com’s General Discussion forum asked Is there a Government Plan to Close Down the Internet? We discuss the merits of this conspiracy theory but also chat a bit about the deeper serious issue of Net Neutrality. If you want to learn more about Net Neutrality and what you can do to protect it, visit SaveTheInternet.com.

Last week’s Poll Question of the Week was “What do you think of phpBB Weekly’s new website?” There were 11 votes (78.57%) saying “Wow, it’s awesome!”; 2 votes (14.29%) saying “Not as good as it was before.”; and 1 vote (7.14%) with No Opinion. This week’s poll question is “Do YOU think there’s a government plan to close down the internet?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on January 24th.

The MOD of the Week is Print a Post Mod by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is Glass Softblue (and other color choices as well) by DoubleJ.

Credit for our fake sponsor of the week goes to A Prairie Home Companion – Garrison Keillor.

As a reminder, phpBB Weekly will not be live on January 17th, but will return live during our usual timeslot on January 24th.

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Episode Duration: 1:08:22
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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We had a slightly harder time preparing for this week’s episode–when you’ve gotten so used to the idea that the phpBB.com teams will have a new news story every single week and then suddenly, there’s nothing new to talk about… let’s say it caught us by surprise. However, we did manage to improvise a pretty good show.

As of the day we recorded this episode, there were only 40 days left until the formal retirement of phpBB2. We take another look at the rapidly-approaching date as well as review the different teams’ timetables for adjusting to the retirement, and Douglas shares that in honor of the retirement, he will be launching a completely brand new phpBBWeekly.net website on January 1st with a new phpBB3-branded album artwork and some new features.

Then, David leads a tutorial about Custom Profile Fields in phpBB3. He covers how they work, how to set them up, as well as how to integrate them into your site and your style in a number of different ways, as well as sharing a number of examples on how he’s used them on StarTrekGuide.

Additional links mentioned in this episode:
Custom Profile Fields Flash Tutorial
Wiki Article on Integrating Custom Profile Fields within your styles

The MOD of the Week is Add Disclaimer by david63 and the Style of the Week is Chrimbo by ModphpBB3.

And, because we couldn’t resist a little pre-Thanksgiving fun, the closing music is from the U Can’t Stuff This eCard. Hope you have a great Turkey Day on Thursday!

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: 1:32:36
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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Douglas returns on this episode of phpBB Weekly to lead the second segment in our “Building a Successful Community” series. Once again stealing/borrowing some content from Patrick O’Keefe’s book, Managing Online Forums, Douglas and David talk about developing user guidelines for your community. They talk about the importance of having user guidelines to help your community get along and succeed, and then go through a number of ideas and suggestions for things that you might want to include in your user guidelines (depending on the makeup of your community, of course).

During the discussion, they also touch on some other important topics, such as dealing with users who try to post advertising and spams on your board, dealing with copyright violations and protecting yourself from the wrath of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), ensuring that you know when/how you have to deal with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998) law, and having a Privacy Policy.

David also welcomes the newest member of the MOD Team, david63, who now brings the phpBB teams’ “David count” to four, not including former team member David Smith (smithy_dll).

And, Douglas introduces phpBB Weekly’s newest contest, the “President Bertie” Election Contest, which will be launching on this website on Tuesday (so check back to find out how to participate).

Other Links Mentioned in This Episode
Bertie Bear for President Facebook Group
Privacy Policy Generator
phpBB.com Rules (for inspiration)
StarTrekGuide Rules (for more inspiration)

The MOD of the Week is RSS Feed 2.0 by leviatan21, and the Style of the Week is parrot by darkbeing-designs.

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

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Download MP3 Episode (53.1 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:32:51
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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We start out this episode of phpBB Weekly first by taking a look back at last weekend’s MOD Authors Convention and briefly recapping some of it (see last week’s episode for full coverage of the event). Then, we tackle a topic that we didn’t get to last week: a discussion about CAPTCHAs in phpBB, as well as some of the difficulties of utilizing CAPTCHAs in open-source projects, along with a look at some of the other efforts at preventing spambot registration on various websites. The moral of the story: whatever you do, turn on User Activation in your phpBB Settings, because no CAPTCHA is perfect.

Then, we turn to the first part of our segment on “Building a Successful Community,” in which Douglas and David discuss the things that a user who wants to create a brand new community needs to plan out from the start, and the skills and qualities that new administrators will need for their community to be successful in the long run. Most of the content for this segment comes out of Patrick O’Keefe’s book, Managing Online Forums.

The MOD of the Week is th23 Domain by th23, and the Style of the Week is Black Pearl by Mighty Gorgon.

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