phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:28:07
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

Okay, maybe the title of this episode overstates it just a little bit, but there’s no doubt that this past week’s announcement of some major phpBB development changes has significant and far-reaching impacts to the phpBB community, which will significantly affect how future phpBB releases are managed and supported. Most importantly, these changes help to clarify the groundwork for Ascraeus (which will now be phpBB 3.1, not 3.2), subsequent releases after Ascraeus, and the eventual phpBB4 coming a few years down the road. Probably most significant, the new roadmap will allow new features (that don’t require a significant rewrite of the phpBB core code) to be brought in to phpBB 3.x sooner than has been the habit with prior releases of phpBB.

On this episode, we go into very hefty detail about both the short-term and long-term impacts of these changes to phpBB’s release strategy, and of course, we’ll be keeping a very close eye going forward as these changes start to become implemented with future phpBB releases.

We also spent a bit of time discussing the fun that took place at the recent phpBB Developer Meeting in Cologne, Germany. Not only is it clear that Bertie had a good time, but a lot of discussion took place, some decisions were made (with the aforementioned development changes likely being one of them), and some touring of the city also took place. We also discussed a bit about the next official phpBB event, which will likely be held in New York City sometime in 2010 (“Libertyvasion”), though obviously it may be a few more months before details come out from the teams.

Finally, we briefly covered a few highlights from some recent commits to the Subversion repository for 3.0.6 (subscribe to the SVN mailing list). There are even more new features coming in 3.0.6 now, such as the ability to report private messages and the ability for a moderator to delete all unread private messages in a user’s outbox (anti-spam measure).

The MOD of the Week is Static Pages by ameeck, and the Style of the Week is Quilting ‘n’ Sewing by billstur.

Be to join us on next week’s episode, when Tom Beddard (subBlue) will join us as our special guest!

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Download MP3 Episode (24.2 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:00:17
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

This episode was supposed to be the first episode with David “Highway of Life” Lewis as our new co-host, but unfortunately, he couldn’t make it. It was still a full episode as Douglas tried to explain MODX without getting too technical or too boring. A big thanks goes out to the many who participated in the show and called in!

Hot off the presses, phpBB is a finalist for the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards for “Best Project for Communications”. It’s a high honor to be winner of this award, so go and vote for phpBB!

In this episode, Douglas gives a brief history of MODX, talks about its advantages and disadvantages, and also talks about the MODX Packaging Guidelines and Versioning System, as well as identifies some resources for MOD authors to use MODX. Many of these can be found at the MODX Resource Centre. It’s also encouraged that MOD authors verify that their MODX package is correct with the mEAL pre-validator tool. There were a few things that the MOD team had not made 100% clear at the recording of this episode. They will probably be submitting me corrections to mistakes that I may have made; these will be mentioned in the comments section of this post and at the beginning of the next show.

The MOD of the Week is Oops – Database Down by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Chairs Template by AngusThermopile.

Douglas will be away in Sacramento on the 14th and at the WordCamp conference on the 21st, so the next live episode will not be until Saturday, July 28th, at the usual time. If there is a big announcement/news from phpBB in the interim, we may release a special episode (not live) to talk about it. Think of this as like my “summer vacation”.