phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:03:39
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), with a brief cameo from David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s a developer’s paradise on this episode of phpBB Weekly. phpBB 3.0.5 has been released, the “quite furry” edition, and the first phpBB release since late last year. With a slew of bugfixes, changes, and new features, headlining the bunch is a new CAPTCHA “wave” setting (to help improve over the cracked CAPTCHA from four months ago) and the long-awaited ability for users to refresh the displayed CAPTCHA. Improvements have now been made to the auto-updater as well, so if you haven’t gotten into the habit of using the auto-updater, now is a good time, as Phil explains.

But we’re already looking ahead to 3.0.6, as the Development Team has been busy pouring checkins to Subversion with some new backports from the Ascraeus branch. Included in there is a whole new “plugin” system for the CAPTCHA/Visual Confirmation which should make it easier for third-party CAPTCHAs to be incorporated to phpBB, although it will mean that authors of existing CAPTCHA MODs may have to do some rewriting pretty soon. Also backported is support for software-based caching engines such as XCache and eAccelerator, which should produce better (and somewhat more secure) results than phpBB’s current op-cache based system. (At least, that’s my understanding of it–Phil gives a better explanation of it on the show, and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I got it wrong.)

Finally, the Development Team offers up another relic in the form of the phpBB Code Swarm video, and Douglas performs his uniquely epic take on the video, live on the show (as in NOT pre-recorded and NOT practiced at all). For those of you who are wanting to share it, it starts at the 37:30 timestamp.

Oh, and the Development Team is moving up in the world! TerraFrost, an acquisition from the MOD Team, has been promoted from Junior Developer to full-fledged Developer, and bantu (also from the MOD Team) is now a Junior Developer. Congrats, folks! Not to be outdone (or deprived of all of their members), the MOD Team has some new Junior Validators: Balint, CoC, daroPL, and platinum_2007.

The MOD of the Week is Quote User Back Link by Erik Frerejean, and the Style of the Week is aktif by napy8gen.

Finally, the bonus at the end of the show is the William Tell Overture by Spike Jones (Douglas’ inspiration for his code swarm video interpretation).

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Episode Duration: 1:51:41
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Johan Janssens

On this very special episode of phpBB Weekly, we are joined by Johan Janssens, the Project Manager and Lead Developer of Joomla! Johan tells us a bit about the Joomla! project, how and why phpBB and Joomla! are collaborating together, and about how the upcoming RokBridge integration between Joomla! 1.5 and phpBB3 will work. David also talks a bit about how the Joomla! integration prompted the addition of the hooks/plugins system for phpBB3, and how it opens up the possibility for many other third-party integrations with phpBB.

But, of course, we can’t forget the other big news of the week. phpBB 3.0.0 “Olympus”, dubbed the “gold release”, was published on December 13th at 17:00 GMT (coincidentally, the same time of day that phpBB Weekly is recorded live). We take a final look back at the countdown to the release, look at the press coverage of the phpBB3 release, and just reminisce and marvel at the five year process. Plus, we examine what’s next for the developers, the teams, an the community as we look down the road ahead.

Additional links mentioned:
Thoughts on Preventing a 2013 Release of phpBB 3.2
phpBB3 Digg Article
Joomla! Roadmap/Development Strategy
Questions for Johan Janssens – phpBB Weekly forum

The MOD of the Week is phpBB3 Error Logging Tool for phpBB3 by Highway of Life, and the Style of the Week is proChristmas for phpBB3 by topdown.

The intro to the episode is David’s Gold Day Prize Video, narrated by our very own illustrious Douglas Bell.

There will not be a live episode next week as Douglas and David will be doing holiday activities with our families, but there will be a Best Of 2007 episode published on Sunday, December 23rd. Feel free to share your favorite moments for the Best Of episode. Douglas will return on December 29th for a Year 2007 Wrap-Up episode, and David will return with Douglas on January 5th.

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: 1:00:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

A lot of weird stuff has been happening around the phpBB community this past week, most of which is the fault of the phpBB team members. First, all of the team members in an over-obvious ploy turned all of their avatars into weird-looking gold replicas (King Midas must have visited phpBB.com!), then David puts all kind of weird encrypted messages on Star Trek Guide leading to this video (passcode: goldday), and now we have a countdown which doesn’t count down to the final release, but counts down to the time when the phpBB teams will tell us when the final release will be, thus enabling us to start the countdown to the final release, etc.

Unfortunately, Douglas doesn’t like suspense, and so the disputes between himself and David during the past week come to a peak as Douglas interrogates David and the other team members on the live show about how crazy they are to pull off all these shenanigans, and in particular David for pulling off his own miniature MacHeist.

In other news, the phpBB Weekly website has been down since Tuesday, and it’s completely the fault of Douglas’ webhost, which has not been responding to his persistent e-mails. As Douglas tries more drastic actions, he asks the phpBB Weekly listeners to chip in and send e-mails to his webhost to see if we can get their attention so Douglas can regain access to phpBBWeekly.net. Please see this forum topic for more info and the latest updates on the situation.

The MOD of the Week is Ajax Shoutbox for phpBB3 by Paul (incidentally, Paul has a test board; username/password is “tester” without quotes), and the Style of the Week is Christmas Style by Kber. We’d still love for listeners to recommend their favorite MODs and Styles to us for consideration on future phpBB Weekly episodes.

Please be sure to join us next week, December 15th, when we will be joined by Johan Jannsens, the project manager and lead developer of Joomla! This will be an exciting episode where we will get to learn a bit about some exciting post-Olympus-release events coming up in phpBB’s near future, plus it will be our last episode before we go on holiday break.

The special intro music for this episode is Also Sprach Zarathustra by Deodato, which was specially picked to commemorate the countdown for phpBB 3.0.0 (and is not going to be our new theme music, don’t worry).

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