On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), Erik Frerejean (erikfrerejean), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman`)

Just because we’re all busy for the 4th of July holiday, doesn’t mean we can’t warm it up with a bang the night before! We got as big of a crowd together as we could for this fire-crackling episode of phpBB Weekly–which wasn’t live, allowing us to pull off a few stunts.

We start by taking another look at the Support Toolkit which hit its first release candidate a little over a week ago. Erik, who helped build the Support Toolkit, gave us a nice rundown of what the Toolkit does and what it’s goals are. Phil also wanted us to give some love (which Douglas took a little literally) to his Support Request Template Generator, which makes it quite a bit easier to submit a support request following the template. If you haven’t heard, it’s a good idea to use the Support Request Template.

David gives us a sneak preview of the Coffee Maker MOD that he’s planning for phpBB 3.2, which will require the USBWine attachment. Whether it’s USBWine or BBCoffee, Douglas probably won’t be satisfied until he can get root beer through a spout over the internet.

[20:44:03] * DavidIQ gags FountainOfApples
[20:44:30] <FountainOfApples> with the phpBB coffee, right?
[20:44:36] <FountainOfApples> that stuff is the worst brew ever
[20:44:42] <FountainOfApples>
[20:46:13] <DavidIQ> well that was while Highway|Away was doing it…American coffee is just blah

The blog post CAPTCHA Plugins and You discusses the new CAPTCHA plugins architecture coming in phpBB 3.0.6, and we look at the announcement in-depth, including what it will mean for style authors, MOD authors, and end users (after some transition, pure spambot-free heaven).

Finally, Douglas talks about a new book he’s been reading, Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. He talks about his experiences and thoughts after converting one of his projects over to OOP mode, and David and Francis promptly scare him again with more technical talk, but overall, we do have a bit of an interesting discussion about the merits of OOP vs. procedural programming. Finally, we all take our best crack and pronouncing Paamayim Nekudotayim, the true name of PHP’s scope resolution operator, and a fancy Hebrew name for “double colon” (::). As if programmers weren’t busy enough.
Overall, Douglas says that he did learn a bit from the book and that it helped make OOP more approachable, but he noted that really only the first two or three chapters are applicable to beginners, and criticized it for breezing through more complex code examples without much explanation, and for an obvious lack of proofreading.

There was no MOD or Style of the Week this week. Credits for this week’s musical escapades go to God Bless the USA – The Hit Crew and Stand Up Comedy – U2. Be sure to join us next Saturday, when we return live to the TalkShoe airwaves!

[20:58:41] <leviatan21> I think all of you are insane !!!
[21:02:25] <DavidIQ> that’s a requirement to be a coder

On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and John Wells (Jhong)

We’re joined on this episode by John Wells (Jhong), the guy behind the WP-United project, an integration between WordPress and phpBB3. He joins us all the way from Shanghai, China, where it is after midnight during this episode. And, courtesy of the Chinese government, we have a little bit of audio quality fun along the way, along with an unexpected encounter with a cheesy arrangement of “Ode to Joy.”

But I digress. John tells us all about WP-United, including why he started it, some of its history, some of its very interesting features (such as the ability to “blend” WordPress and phpBB elements on the same page), and how an administrator would get it to work. We also discuss a little bit about programming the integration for phpBB2 vs. phpBB3, and compare it to phpBB3’s Hook System which makes other integrations like the RokBridge-Joomla! integration possible.

Then, Micheal takes the opportunity to go over the phpBB Support Toolkit, which just had its first RC release this week. This is sure to be a very powerful and useful tool once it goes final, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it on this show.

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll was “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” There were 35 votes cast, shattering our previous record of 20. Here’s the results:
10 votes (29%) for an “Automatic idiot user filter.”
6 votes (17%) for a “Rocket launcher (David’s suggestion).”
6 votes (17%) for “A front that doesn’t fall off.”
5 votes (14%) for a “Coffee maker. (Take that, Starbucks!)”
3 votes (9%) for “The kitchen sink.”
3 votes (9%) for “Insurance from Paul’s continuous slapping.”
And 2 other votes (6%): “no new features!” and “Nicole Scherzinger”.

Our new poll is “What would be the most likely impact of enabling Quick Reply on your board?” Vote in this poll in the sidebar on the right; this poll will be open until Saturday, July 11.

The MOD of the Week is User Notes/Warnings in Viewtopic by RMcGirr83, and the Style of the Week is AcidTech Tiger by CyberAlien.

Remember that there will not be a live episode next weekend due to the 4th of July holiday (in the United States); our next live episode will be on July 11th.

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On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

How does one follow up the episode that we had last week, when we covered the surge of changes coming in 3.0.6? Well, for one thing, we did have the chance to hear the opinion of Mr. “We Know Where You Live, We’re Coming Now” himself, as we get Ash (NeoThermic) to give his opinion of the new quick reply coming in 3.0.6. Oh, and we did take some time to acknowledge the efforts of the Development Team to bring on new Junior Developers — combined with the full Development Team, we’re looking at the most developers phpBB has ever had at one time. Not too shabby, eh?

However, we decided to focus this show on a phpBB tutorial that we’ve never actually covered before, if you can believe that such a thing exists. We’re talking about Converting to phpBB. If you’ve got one of the Available Convertors, you can bring many other bulletin board programs (or in some cases, phpBB2 with certain MODs installed) up to phpBB3. In addition to going through how to convert a board over to phpBB3 (which is really easy, thanks to phpBB’s Unified Convertor Framework), we also overview what’s actually involved in building and maintaining a phpBB convertor.

Meanwhile, Micheal sympathizes with a Gumblar victim, and Douglas shares some new developments regarding OSCONvasion 2009. phpBB Weekly will (likely) be streaming live from OSCONvasion, on Thursday 7/23, so if you can’t join us in person, hopefully you can join in live!

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question, “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” continues through Saturday 6/27, so be sure to vote on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is AJAX Quick Edit by mac1706, and the Style of the Week is ClanzDarkness3 by Griffin.

And, credits for the closing bonus goes to a Muppet interpretation of “Ode to Joy”.

Be sure to join us next week, when we will be joined by guest John Wells (Jhong) of the WP-United project! Share your questions for him on our forum.

On this Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

It’s just like old times on this episode of phpBB Weekly! Douglas and David are solo-hosting the show, David makes up a fake name for himself at the start of the show, and the episode lasts forever.

But on the contrary side of things, the main focus of this episode is an unprecedented announcement from the Development Team describing new features coming in phpBB 3.0.6, a “maintenance/bugfix release,” for Pete’s sake! We thoroughly analyze each of the announced new features and discuss what they’ll do, why they will be added, and what the effects will be for MOD authors in particular.

The new features include a new CAPTCHA plugins architecture, ATOM (RSS) feeds, support for four new cache/ACM plugins (and a no-cache option), exempting group leader permissions for groups, group management changes for the post queue and other permissions, separation/clarification of the Reply/Reply to All functions for private messages, pagination for smilies and icons, the ability to search logs, and other tiny features and bugfixes. And quick reply. Yes, Q U I C K R E P L Y, as Meik posted, representing a significant about-face from the phpBB teams which have traditionally been firmly against the inclusion of a quick reply feature since who knows when, and Douglas and David spend a bit of time talking about the significance of this quick reply concession and why we think it’s a good thing.

Then, Douglas formally announces the full details of the OSCONvasion 2009 meetup he is organizing, happening in San Jose, California in late-July. If you’re going to be in the Bay Area or are planning to come to OSCON, we hope you can make it!

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll question was “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” The top response was Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) with a whopping 13 votes (65%), followed by “The guy who made the front fall off” with 5 votes (25%), in closing up with Steve Wozniak and “The father of the internet” each receiving 1 vote (5%). President Barack Obama received 0 votes.
Our next phpBB Weekly Poll will be “What would be another feature you’d like to see added to 3.0.6?” The poll runs until Saturday, June 27th; vote in the right-hand sidebar on our site.

No MOD or Style of the Week this week. The episode’s closing music is Do You Know the Way to San Jose – Dionne Warwick, and the quick reply clip comes from the Discussion Panel at Londonvasion, and was also heard on phpBB Weekly #072.

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).

phpBB code swarm from phpBB on Vimeo.

Now at the end of his announcement, Meik said that “We wish everyone to have fun with this video, simply enjoy it.” Well, if you know us on phpBB Weekly, and me in particular, we’ll be sure to have fun with this video, but not just by simply enjoying it. No, we (mainly I) have to have fun with it in our (my) own special way. So be sure to tune in tomorrow to phpBB Weekly #108 (or wait until it’s released this weekend) for a zany interpretation of the code swarm that might rival the fun we had with BBGourmet, performed live on the show. Sound like fun? Yeah, if the internet can survive it. Until then, later…

Therefore, we always invite you to head over to our Donate page and make a donation to help support the production of phpBB Weekly. Donations are not tax-deductible or anything, but they do help us to support phpBB Weekly and hopefully keep it going for many more months and years to come. Plus, if you donate, you can optionally select to be publicly featured on a “Donor Wall” that will appear on the Donate page of our website!

In lieu of advertising, every six months or so, we will be posting a little reminder like this that we do accept donations for the show. Thanks for your support and continued enjoyment of phpBB Weekly.

On this episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman`), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Paul Sohier (Paul)

Talk about one whacky reunion episode. Douglas comes in fresh off of his high school graduation and is stumped as to why he is not entirely fast asleep during the show. David and Francis make their grand return after 3 months’ absence, and as a skit, they hold a SCOFF News-style interview of Australian Senator Collins about a crashed oil tanker. Paul will slap Douglas to high heaven if this episode isn’t released before the end of May, and we have all kinds of crazy technical difficulties throughout the show. (And yes, that stuttering that happens during the first 2-3 minutes? That’s David’s fault too.)

Nevertheless, we have kind of a random discussion episode, during which Micheal shares a bit more about the FTP Trojans that we discussed last week, we share rumors on what’s taken so long for the release of phpBB 3.0.5 (and typical to fashion, it was just released today), and David shares the incredible saga that has taken him and Francis away from phpBB for the past few months and continuing for the next few months as well. Douglas takes the opportunity to share some plans for helping to revitalize phpBB Weekly during the remaining summer months of David’s prolonged leave of absence, and we also talk a bit about the best readme file ever.

There is no MOD or Style of the Week this week. Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” Vote in the poll in our sidebar on the right; the poll closes Saturday, June 13.

And don’t miss the little bonus featurette at the end of the episode; I spent a lot of time editing that!

Michael and Douglas are joined on this episode by an old friend, Paul Sohier, who is now on a new team: the Support Team. For obvious reasons, Micheal is pleased and Douglas a bit confused, but Paul explains that he’s been working in support longer than he’s been working with MODs, and has been enjoying the change of pace.

The MOD Team, however, hasn’t been standing still. Once again, a new release to talk about: AutoMOD has hit RC-1. Exciting, you bet, particularly since EasyMOD never made it out of beta! While it’s not approved for fully-stable use yet, AutoMOD is about to hit the big time, and we’ll continue to follow its progress over the summer.

Micheal mentions that this old blog post simply identifies possibilities that injections could be created by MODs if the authors aren’t careful–it does NOT list actual injection vulnerabilities in phpBB3! Beware the naysayers!

And for our main topic of discussion, a new phpBB.com blog post discusses the Gumblar and Martuz trojans, two trojans which track down your FTP credentials and then use them to trash your site(s). We go over the blog post and discuss what these trojans do, how they work, and how to keep yourself safe (hint: keep your antivirus definitions up-to-date!). Also be sure to keep regular backups of your site so that if it does get hacked (it may not be your fault if your site IS hacked), you can completely wipe the hacked site and start fresh. If your site has been hacked, use Unmask Parasites to do a thorough check once you’ve cleaned house.

The MOD of the Week is Posting Template by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Prospace by spaceace.

Be sure to join us on Saturday, May 30th, for David Lewis’ return to phpBB Weekly and important announcements about this show, as well as Douglas’ post-graduation attempts to stay awake!

Again, sorry about the late release on this one; it’s been near-impossible to find a chance to get this episode edited! In our defense though, phpBB 3.0.5 STILL hasn’t been released, even though we talked about it on this episode eleven days ago!

On this episode, due to a late start, we wound up being joined again by phpBB Support Team Leader Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty) alongside Micheal Cottingham and Douglas Bell. Having missed out of two weeks’ worth of episodes, we primarily spend this episode recapping on a bit of phpBB news.

UMIL’s third release candidate is out, and so we spend a little bit of time recapping UMIL and its future importance for phpBB3 MOD authors. We also note that RC-1 of phpBB 3.0.5 has been released to the QA Team for testing, which contains a number of new features and changes and lots of bugfixes. (It has, after all, been more than five months in the making.) It should be released on phpBB.com fairly soon.

Finally, the MOD Team announced that they have released policies for MOD validation which contains details on what they look for during validation, insta-deny/repackage policies, etc. All MOD authors planning on submitting to the MODs Database should read these policies carefully, as following this policies will help you avoid having your MOD be denied!

Our last Poll Question of the Week was “What’s the most importance advice to give to a phpBB Supporter?” The top answer was “No matter what your signature says, you can kiss the sanctity of your PM box goodbye” with 5 votes (42%). Next up was “If someone actually figures out that they should use the Support Request Template, then they deserve premium service” with 4 votes (33%). Next up was “Let the Support Team deal with idiots. That’s where they get their fun.” with 2 votes (17%). And last was “Speak softly and carry a big stick” with 1 vote (8%). Receiving no votes was “Never tell people to ’search,’ only to ‘follow directions.’”

The MOD of the Week is phpBB Mood Swings by Xanta Media, and the Style of the Week is SkyLineBlue by MartectX.