Hello everyone,

If you guys haven’t noticed, the month of June is quite a busy month for both myself and David. I had a trip to China earlier this month and will be leaving this Saturday and all next week on another excursion, and David just got back from a couple of days in Vancouver in addition to a very busy work schedule. So we’ve been kind of busy, but rather than cutting out almost all of our episodes for this month, we still wanted to try to get a full month of phpBB Weekly for you all, especially with everything that’s happening right now.

So here’s what’s up. Episode #065, which David recorded on June 7th, will be edited and released either today or tomorrow. David is in the process of getting the recording over to me. Episode #066 was already released on Tuesday.

Instead of doing the episode that we had scheduled for this Saturday live, we’re instead going to do it off of TalkShoe before I leave on my next excursion, which means that there will be no live episode this Saturday. It will be released tomorrow or really early on Saturday, unusually early for phpBB Weekly.
Our next live episode will be on Saturday, June 28th at the normal time. David will be doing it without me because I won’t be getting back until that afternoon, but we’ll try to get it edited and released on the usual schedule.

So that’s that; just wanted to fill you in. Thanks for your patience and thanks for continuing to listen to phpBB Weekly!
–Douglas Bell

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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.

Hello everyone,

Recently, this show has gone through a number of upheavals, whether it be hosts who couldn’t be present or having problems with our live-show service, TalkShoe. David and I have been getting frustrated with some of the issues we’ve been having, and so are going to be making some changes, which I’d like to begin to outline to you below.

Goodbye TalkShoe?
When I started this show in January, my primary basis for it was to have a show not just talking about creating communities with phpBB, but to actually have a community that could participate and be a part of the show. For these past few months, TalkShoe has been the tool that has allowed us to pull this off. However, during the last month or two, we have been dealing with a significant increase in difficulties with TalkShoe, to the point where if you were on yesterday’s episode of phpBB Weekly, you heard how I had to cut the show short (it was a 25 minute show!) due to TalkShoe completely giving up on me.

Even though yesterday’s episode #037 wasn’t that great, David and I have decided that we will release it anyway, however we’re going to start testing some alternatives to TalkShoe, and we have already began researching some of these. If we find one that we like this week, it is very likely that on episode #038 this Saturday, we will be “beta testing” a different service. Of course, we will be announcing details later on this week here on this blog.

If we determine that we like that service, then a number of significant changes will happen here on phpBB Weekly. For one thing, our feed URLs will change as we will be moving off of TalkShoe feeds and managing the podcast feed in-house. This will probably also give us an opportunity to launch an updated website, something I’ve been wanting to do for a little while now. Anyway, stay tuned, as we’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on this blog about any changes that are going to happen.

Daylight Savings Time
A number of countries have seen time changes ending recently, and in the case of the United States, we just had DST end last night. Therefore, the time of our show will be changing. We will still be recording the show on Saturdays starting at 12 PM Eastern Time, however this means that the show will be starting at 1700 UTC, not 1600 UTC. You may want to check your local time so you know when phpBB Weekly will be starting now in your area.

DavidMJ
David and I have gotten so many e-mails in the last month asking if we’re going to get DavidMJ back on the show, after he had to unexpectedly miss episode #034. I am very glad to announce that DavidMJ has agreed to guest host this Saturday, November 10th, on phpBB Weekly #038, to talk about phpBB3 (what else?). If you have any questions for him, there’s a topic in the phpBB Weekly forum, or you can come on the show on Saturday or ask him yourself!

Thanks for continuing to listen to phpBB Weekly, and for bearing with us as we go through these growing pains. When I started this show in January, I had no idea that it would grow into what it is today, and by going through these changes, we’re working to make the show even better for you, the listeners.