phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:14:52
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

This weekend, we mark phpBB Weekly’s second anniversary (that right, can you believe we’ve been doing this for two years now?) and the beginning of the year 2009. But that also brings with it some other news, which may or may not be disappointing depending on your point of view: phpBB2 has been officially retired and support for phpBB2 has ended. We take a look at the end of support announcement and look down the road and discuss how phpBB2 will be further phased out over the next few weeks and months. And Douglas is once again very disappointed about the news, while David tries to tell him to get over it.

However, if you didn’t already notice, we launched a new website for ourselves, and so we spend a bit of the beginning of the episode reviewing what has changed on our website and on our podcast, as well as providing a glimpse of some further changes that may be coming down the road.

The MOD Team continues to make waves with the announcement that the MPV (MOD pre-validator) source code has been released in the MODX Tools repository of the phpBB Code Forge, plus it can now run on any site without the need to have phpBB installed. We discuss the reasons for releasing the MPV source and David also attempts to describe some of the other tools under development in the MODX Tools repository. He couldn’t remember all of them, however, so we’ll probably make some corrections next week.

Finally, there will be a phpBB Meeting in Scotland, UK on Saturday, January 24th. We discuss a bit of the activities that will be happening there; we’re not sure yet if we’ll be doing anything special in connection with the meetup on the 24th or not, so stay tuned. Plus, Douglas has decided to do something about his own pipe dreams and has posted a topic looking for interest in a San Francisco phpBB conference/meetup this summer, and David and Douglas discuss some of the logistics of that, if it happens. Plus, Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic) also shares some perspective on both of these via the chat room.

The MOD of the Week is Prime Birthdate Require by primehalo, and the Style of the Week is Revolution by Semi_Deus. Also, our first-ever phpBB Weekly poll question for this week is “What do you think of the new phpBB Weekly website?” Vote in the poll on the right sidebar on our website, and we’ll evaluate the responses to the poll on our next episode.

2009 is here, and we’re ready for another great year of phpBB Weekly! Thanks for listening, as always.

I am very excited to welcome you to the new and improved phpBB Weekly website, completely renovated for 2009. This new website stemmed from an album artwork proposal that David made last April and which we adopted to bring our design a bit more in-line with phpBB3/Olympus, now that phpBB2 has been formally retired. The new design and layout for this site has been in development for the past four weeks under the secret codename “Area52.” (Because Area51 would have been too obvious.) Along with the new website, we also have new album artwork and new banners (find them on the Promote page), as well as a couple of new things we’re going to start doing on the show. Read on to get a full overview of what’s new…
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Hello everyone,

As we have mentioned over and over and over again, we will be launching a brand new website, new album artwork, and some other new features for the podcast this week, coinciding with the retirement of phpBB2. While the website and new features are being kept under wraps (after all, we like to keep secrets as much as the teams do), here’s what the new artwork will look like, if you haven’t seen it yet:

However, because I’m just a little bit behind on finishing up my college applications (don’t ask), I will be postponing both the release of our phpBB Weekly “Best of 2008″ clip show episode and the new website by a day. Therefore, the clip show episode will be released this Thursday, January 1st (instead of Wednesday, December 31st as originally announced).

That said, phpBBWeekly.net will be taken offline beginning at 1:00 PM EST (1800 UTC) on Friday, January 2nd, which is the day that we will launch our new website. During this time the files and database for the new site will move in and we will also do some last minute revisions and bug checking on the new site–this will hopefully only take an hour or two depending on whether the technology gods will be willing to cooperate. You will still be able to access our episodes during this period on our TalkShoe page.

Thanks for your cooperation. I’m sure you’ll love our new website as much as I do! Until then, have a very happy new year.

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Episode Duration: 1:16:17
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Dave Rathbun (drathbun)

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With the official retirement of phpBB2 fast-approaching, what is someone still using the legacy version of phpBB to do? Where are they supposed to go? Well, on this episode, phpBB.com Moderator Team member Dave Rathbun joins us to tell us about a new site he is launching to provide a home for these wandering souls: phpBB2Refugees, which launches on December 9th (that’s today!). During the episode, Dave tells us about phpBB2Refugees, including what the site’s goals are, how long he intends to run it, as well as a bit of info on some of the things he did to put it together. (If you look closely, it won’t take long to notice that their installation of phpBB2 has quite a number of MODs present.) We highly recommend that you check out their site and recommend it to any phpBB2-using friends that you are aware of.

We also chat a bit with Dave about the Moderator Team, and about his infamous phpBB Doctor Blog, which has a lot of really interesting content that you’ll want to take a look at.

And in honor of today’s topic, we switched ranks this week and chose a phpBB2 MOD and Style this week. The MOD of the Week is Approval MOD by uncle.f, and the Style of the Week is Christmas by CyberAlien. We’d also like to hear your MOD and Style Recommendations for us to possibly feature in future episodes!

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

You know, phpBB Weekly is no longer the young, fledgling, relatively-unknown podcast that it once was. This show is now almost seventeen months old, and we’ve got more than sixty episodes behind our belt, most of which have some outstanding content, whether it be tutorials, interviews, news coverage, or just random jibber jabber. However, because a lot of what we talk about is timeless–as relevant now as it was when we recorded it–we’ve been wanting to come up with a way to spotlight our past episodes, giving our long-time listeners a way to rediscover them, and our newer listeners a way to discover them for the first time.

And so, after a lot of work that I’ve gone through sorting, organizing, and linking, I’m excited to announce the introduction of the phpBB Weekly Zeitgeist! Ignoring the weird cool name, the Zeitgeist is essentially a grouping of our past episodes organized into different categories, so that you can discover past episodes that are of interest to you.

Of course, this is the first time I’ve tried doing something like this, so if you have any feedback, please feel free to let us know in the comments section of this topic. We hope that this will be useful to you.