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Now that we’ve emerged from Londonvasion, we came on this episode still a bit hungover from the excitement of the event, and a little but unsure of what to cover, so we decided to talk about some of the latest news from phpBB.com, not expecting that the episode would turn out to be as long as it did. We’re also joined on this episode by Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), the Support Team leader.

The phpBB Discussion forums have been reorganized into one basic, general phpBB Discussion forum. We talk about what the change means and some of the reasons why it was implemented.

Then, there’s a new post on the phpBB.com Blog about template inheritance, a new feature coming in phpBB 3.0.3 based on some requests that originated at Londonvasion, and provides a way for style authors to simplify their styles by basing portions of them on other templates (like prosilver or subsilver2, for example). We talk a bit about template inheritance and describe how it will work.

Finally, for a topic that David requested, we discuss an ongoing discussion on the phpBB.com forums relating to the recent blog post on MOD Author feedback. We cover some of the issues that were brought up in this discussion and talk about how the MOD team should and better communicate with the MOD community, and some of the other documentation, ongoing projects, and tools that the MOD team is working on to help out MOD authors. The MOD team continues to accept feedback on the MOD Database and the validation process.

The MOD of the Week is RedBar3 by cherokee red, and the Style of the Week IS AeroBlue by jrolson.

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Londonvasion is now officially over (can you believe it?), and to wrap-up the big event, we bring on a great panel of team members to tell us all about their experiences at the conference. MOD Team Member and phpBB Weekly Co-Host David Lewis (Highway of Life), Support Team Member and Londonvasion Coordinator Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), and MOD Team Member and phpBB Team-Slapper Paul Sohier (Paul) join us for a delightfully fun and interesting episode as we look back on the accomplishments made in order to pull off the first-ever real-life gathering of the phpBB team members. We also look ahead at what 2009 will possibly bring. Plus, keep your eyes open for the videos from Londonvasion which will be coming out later this week, hopefully.

Douglas also gives us another update at the phpBBHacks.com Idol where Round 2 of voting is now open.

Additional Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Dave Rathbun’s Londonvasion Recaps
phpBB.com Announcement: Beyond Londonvasion
phpBB.com Blog Post: Things We Took from London
Londonvasion Central
David’s Londonvasion Photos
Yuriy’s Bertie Lawyers
The Magnificent Seven Touring London
Paul on the Bus
Yuriy’s Bertie Collection (mentioned in the after-show)

The MOD of the Week is Highlight from Search Engine by joebert, and the Style of the Week is Dark Fantasy by Daniel Exe.

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On this special episode of phpBB Weekly, we held a live stream of the Question & Answer Team Member Panel Discussion session taking place at Londonvasion 2008. A panel of team members answered various questions from the Londonvasion audience, from the phpBB IRC channels, and most of all, from the phpBB Weekly live audience. This quality wasn’t the best (had a number of technical difficulties to get the stream to work at all), but nevertheless, this was certainly an interesting session to be a part of. Listen in on this exclusively-special episode of phpBB Weekly!

Thanks in particular to David Lewis, Paul Sohier, Yuriy Rusko, and Eric Faerber for helping us get through the technical issues on the London side of this episode.

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IMPORTANT! Contrary to what was said on this episode, we are still going to be doing our live episode streaming from Londonvasion as planned.

This episode, however, did not go according to plan, due to the fact that the team members had an important presentation to be at that conflicted with this live episode, and the London hotel that they were staying at had a miserably poor internet connection. (The hotel has promised that there will be a much, much better connection at Londonvasion, according to an e-mail David sent awhile after this episode ended.) So Douglas, left by himself, tried to fill for time by discussing some of the team member photos from Londonvasion and covering what will be discussed at Londonvasion based on the finalized schedule.

In addition, voting in the phpBBHacks.com Idol has begun, and Douglas explains how the voting will work and who is up against who. Go help determine who will win all of the fabulous prizes and their own library of books (not to mention the ever-important bragging rights)!

Finally, on the request of the ever-helpful chat room on TalkShoe, Douglas summarizes the latest MOD team post on the blog concerning MOD author feedback and how they handle it.

The MOD of the Week is Advanced Meta Tags by Drugs, and the Style of the Week is Getaway by CyberAlien.

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Don’t ask why David has this pipe dream of a short episode of phpBB Weekly, but this episode sure didn’t turn out to be what he was looking for. Which might be a good thing. While we did ramble off of our expected script a bit, we had a pretty good, in-depth discussion in the middle of the show.

phpBB 3.0.2 has been released, and we discuss what’s new and the various bugs that have been fixed, along with a few minor new features.

We then go into a bit of a discussion about the duties that the phpBB MOD team has and discuss a bit about their documentation and how their phpBB3 MODding documentation differs a bit from the docs that they had back when phpBB2 MODding was the “in” thing.

Also, the phpBB Blog has been unveiled as a new way to bridge the gap between the team members and the community, as well as a partial replacement for the now-dormant Official phpBB Podcast, and David leads us in a short game of musical chairs. You’ll just have to find out what that menas for yourself.

Finally, in our Londonvasion Update (and yes, we remembered the jingle this time), David shares what his personal travel itinerary will be in London, and we share our finalized Londonvasion plans and Douglas talks about Londonvasion Central.

There is no MOD or Style of the Week this week.

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Although we will be primarily streaming the session (and so any discussion taking place between ourselves will not be heard by the Londonvasion attendees), our own David Lewis will be listening in and keeping an eye on our live chat room, and so if you have a question that you would like to ask the team members, there’s a good chance that David will be able to relay your question over to the team members and you’ll be able to have your question answered. Plus, this will be the only part of Londonvasion being streamed live in any form, so this will be a great chance for those of you unable to attend Londonvasion to listen in and participate in what could very well be one of its most interesting sessions.

We hope that you’ll plan to join us live (or else stream it via the badge on our site) for this exciting special episode of phpBB Weekly, and please share this announcement with anyone else who would be interested!

And of course, be sure to check out Londonvasion Central for lots more complete coverage of Londonvasion.

David and I are getting ready to kick into high gear for the beginning of Londonvasion, which is now only a week and a half away. While our next few episodes of phpBB Weekly will be doing full coverage of the event, I hope you’ll check out Londonvasion Central for more big news from Londonvasion in between our episodes and as it all happens.

Enjoy! Londonvasion (and the wrath of BertieZilla) awaits!
–Douglas Bell

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This episode of phpBB was a fun one for Douglas because he had the opportunity to go back and talk about phpBB2 again! And he owes it all to, of all people, the MOD team, thanks to their release of EasyMOD 0.4.0 for phpBB2.

But first, Patrick O’Keefe of phpBBHacks.com joins us once again to tell us all about phpBBHacks.com Idol, a contest that’s partially about MODs and Styles and much more about popularity, along with the chance to win nearly $1000 worth in prizes and books (plus we’re throwing in the chance to be featured on a future episode of phpBB Weekly!). The deadline to submit your phpBB3 MOD/hack or style is Saturday, July 12, after which, voting will begin! We’ll be keeping a close eye on this contest as it progresses.

Then of course, Douglas talks all about EasyMOD 0.4.0, including recapping a bit on EasyMOD’s long history, discussing what’s new in 0.4.0 (mostly MODX support), and reviewing the release based on some testing that he did. David also gives us a bit more insight on the upcoming MOD Package Manager (Blinky) that’s still in development.

And speaking of the MOD team and phpBB2, per the phpBB2 Retirement Plan, the MOD team set the MOD Requests and MOD Writers Discussion forums for phpBB2 to read only on July 1, as well as disabling new topics in the MODs in Development forum for phpBB2, which we talk briefly about. Dave Rathbun (drathbun) also joins us to talk about these various phpBB2 topics.

And, last but not least, people have been receiving their 3.0 Berties at last, and the crazy pictures are here.

For what might possibly be our last phpBB2 MOD and Style of the Week (though please leave a comment if you’d like the phpBB2 MOD and Style coverage to continue), the MOD of the Week is Visual Confirmation on New Posters by Thoul, and the Style of the Week is subMerged by redhair.

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Is your website secure? What if you learned that half a million websites have been hacked via SQL Injections just since last January? On this episode, David Lewis is joined by Paul (of the MODs Team) and Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic, Support Team Leader), in which they discuss how site owners can be aware of SQL injection vulnerabilities, how they can prevent vulnerabilities in their own site, and how you can identify possible SQL injections within MODs that you download. And for MOD authors out there, they discuss the phpBB3 framework and how you can use it to prevent SQL injections in MODs.

Plus, have you ever run phpBB3 and made a change to your site, but nothing changed? That’s probably due to phpBB3’s caching of content, templates, and themes. David and the others discuss how to properly purge the cache with phpBB3, as well as discussing the differences between the different kinds of cached content.

And of course, Londonvasion is getting ever-closer, and so we’ve got your latest fix on Londonvasion news right here, as usual. Stay tuned as we finalize phpBB Weekly’s own Londonvasion plans over the next few weeks; we’ll be keeping you posted.

The MOD of the Week is Purge cache from any page for phpBB3 by Elglobo, and the Style of the Week is Day Song for phpBB3 by APT92.

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We thought that we would have a nice, short episode this week, but unfortunately, we love to digress so much that this episode ended up lasting a cool hour and a half! Nevertheless, we didn’t get as off-topic as we have tended to do during our past few not-live episodes, and for that, I guess we should be commended (?).

On this episode, we start by having David recap his experiences last weekend at Joomla!Day Vancouver (and the other sightseeing that he did in Vancouver in general). During the discussion, we end up covering things such as how the Joomla! folks had some interesting phpBB feature requests based on their unique point of view on how phpBB could be run, as well as some of the different ways that the Joomla! teams and community are organized, etc.

Afterwards, we take a look at the recently-released Londonvasion 2008 schedule, looking at each planned presentation and what will be talked about at the event. We do not know yet whether or not anything will be streamed from the event, nor do we know final details on what kind of coverage we’ll be doing from the event, since all that is still subject to change, but we’ll keep you posted.

Finally, Firefox 3 was released this past week, and so in honor of it, Douglas points out a Firefox Add-on for phpBB in addition to the MOD and Style of the Week: phpBB Canned Responses for Firefox 1.5-3.0 by Pumazooma (NOTE: this is still in beta!). In addition, as usual, the MOD of the Week is Automatic Daylight Savings Time (DST) for phpBB3 by MartectX, and the Style of the Week is RonPaul2008 for phpBB3 by blackraven007.

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