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The news media is busy traveling from one convention in Denver to another in St. Paul, and that means that they’re all ignoring the most important convention of all: the 2008 phpBB MOD Authors Convention! Well, we didn’t, and our panel of experts (Douglas, David, and Paul) report live from the MOD Authors Convention, providing their analysis of the events and presentations of the convention, as well as wondering why the MOD team didn’t nominate someone to run for president.

Anyway, we did discuss the various sessions at the MOD Authors Convention and talk about some of the highlights that were discussed. For example, in the “future of MODding” session, there was a certain amount of discussion about the possibility of introducing “Junior Validators” into the validation process. If this went forward, this would be like allowing certain users to be able to participate in the “testing” phase of validation, but not the line-by-line/security/etc. phases, and could also serve as a way for the MOD team to evaluate possible new additions to the team.

We also recapped the announcement that Paul hinted about last week, which was that the MOD team’s MOD pre-validator (MPV) tool is now publicly available. We discuss MPV in detail, including how it works and how it compares to the previous mEAL tool that was chiefly written by David Smith (smithy_dll).

There was also discussion at the convention about the phpBB Wiki (which was formally announced towards the end of the day), which will serve as the primary source of development, MODding, and (possibly) styling documentation for phpBB, and like all wikis will be user-contributable. We talked a bit more about the Wiki and how the MOD team’s goal of streamlining its documentation (we’ve talked about this a few times recently) ties into this new announcement.

And of course, this episode took place during the second “phpBB3 MODding & Best Practices” session, which was supposed to be David’s session, except he kinda played hooky from that so he could join in on this episode. However, he does summarize the main points from his session for us, answers a few questions from us, and fields requests from our chat room and from the #phpbb-mod channel to publish his session as a book.

Additional links mentioned in this episode:
MAMP/MAMP Pro
Wiki article: Creating Modules for phpBB3
Wiki article: Adding Modules to phpBB3

And finally, we ran out of time to mention it on this episode, but you should really check out the recent blog post on CAPTCHAs in phpBB, which gives a very interesting look at the evolution of phpBB’s CAPTCHA (aka “visual confirmation image”) and some of the inherent problems with CAPTCHAs and other anti-spambot security techniques.

The MOD of the Week is Tabulated Survey at Topic Head by asinshesq, and the Style of the Week is prosilver Special Edition by Styles Robot (or, more accurately, the phpBB.com Styles Team).

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

Tags: event, IRC, MOD Authors Convention, MOD Team, MODding, phpBB3, tutorial, Wiki

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We return from our three week break energized and ready to go with our fall “season” of phpBB Weekly, and we kick it off with the realization that there’s a whole bunch of news for us to cover from just the past few days.

The MOD and Styles Databases have been upgraded with the ability to subscribe to individual MOD updates by e-mail (and, according to Paul, there’s a secret RSS feed as well). Speaking of the databases, thirteen phpBB3 styles have finally been approved for the Styles Database. In addition, the Styles Team has announced a new styles validation policy regarding how they will handle new releases of phpBB and how it will affect style validation. The Londonvasion videos are now available as well, and David shares some of his recommendations for the best ones to watch if you don’t have time for all of them.

The MOD Team will be holding its third annual MOD Authors Convention next Saturday, August 30 in the #phpbb-mod IRC channel. We briefly describe what sessions will be presented at the convention on this episode, and will be providing complete live coverage of the convention on next week’s episode. And finally, PHP 4.4.9 has been released, signifying the last release of PHP 4 as the PHP Group drops support for it, plus PHP 5.3 is in early release candidate stage, and we discuss some of the development team’s recent changes in the Subversion repository in response to the new version of PHP.

We then bring you a tutorial on the ways you can optimze search engine optimization (SEO) in phpBB3, from our local SEO expert, David Lewis, whose blog post on SEO and phpBB3 just appeared on the phpBB.com Blog.

Links from the SEO Tutorial and Other Recommended SEO Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
SEO MOD
Advanced Meta Tags MOD
What are Google Sitemaps?

This week’s MOD and Style of the Week are the winners of the recent phpBBHacks.com Idol (which means that these two authors won over $1200 worth of prizes for their products!). The winning hack/MOD is Log Connections by Elglobo and the winning style is Soul City by Abble CoSa NoStrA.

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

Tags: development, episode, Londonvasion, MOD Authors Convention, MOD Database, MODs, PHP 4, PHP 5, phpBBHacks.com Idol, SEO, Styles, Styles Database, subscriptions, Subversion, tutorial, videos

Well, okay, the title is exaggerating the point a little bit. When you’ve seen so many advertisements on the TeeVee for the lame shows that are starting up again soon (note that I’m NOT saying which ones), I kinda have the urge to mock it. But I digress.

Beginning this Saturday, August 23rd, phpBB Weekly will return from our summer break, aka the three weeks off that we took during August, to resume producing live episodes of phpBB Weekly. The time off was certainly worth it, because after nearly four months of almost-continuous coverage of Londonvasion (we did talk about some other things too, obviously), we kind of felt a bit exhausted from all of the buildup and a little bit lost in terms of what to talk about now that we didn’t have an event to cover all the time. Taking a few weeks off give both of us a chance to catch up with some things, collect ourselves, and regroup as we get prepared to continue going with phpBB Weekly this fall.

There will be some new things happening. We’re kicking off this Saturday with our 75th episode (three-quarters of the way to that auspicious one hundred mark!), where we’ll cover some of the news that has emerged over the last few weeks, and David will give us a tutorial on SEO for phpBB3. Those of you around when David first joined this podcast as a co-host more than a year ago will know that SEO is one of his specialities. There will also be an announcement coming soon that will keep us occupied for a few episodes.

We’ve also come to realize that we’ve covered nearly all of the phpBB3 tutorials that there is to cover on this podcast (but if you disagree, let us know and we’ll correct that). And so, we’re going to start moving into some new territory by starting a recurring segment with tips on Building a Successful Community. Loosely based on Patrick O’Keefe’s book along with other sources and our own experiences, we’ll be dedicating episodes to covering the steps and tips on building and managing a community successfully from the ground up. This is stuff that doesn’t just apply to phpBB users, but to administrators of any community out on the internet. In addition, as part of this segment, we’ll be bringing guests to interview on the show who have built successful communities from scratch and will share their tips and secrets to success. We will be starting the segment in September and, barring unforeseen circumstances, will be doing the segment at least twice a month. The very tentative “schedule” for this segment is currently set for the first & third weeks of the month, but this is subject to change depending on what our other topics of conversation will be.

Of course, we wouldn’t be doing new stuff on phpBB Weekly without asking for your input. We’re always looking for ideas of stuff to talk about on the show, so we’d love you to tell us what you think. Join in our live chat room or call us on the show and share your thoughts and tips. If you think that you’ve built a successful community from the ground up and have thoughts that you’d like to share, let us know and we’ll consider inviting you to be interviewed on the show. We get our ideas and our inspiration from all of you, so we really appreciate hearing from you.

Summer is ending, and we’re ready to get back into the show! We hope that you’ll join us again on phpBB Weekly, starting this Saturday!

P.S. Despite what you read in this topic, phpBB Weekly is NOT currently the “replacement” for the Official phpBB Podcast. The teams have not in any way contacted us about phpBB Weekly taking the official podcast’s place or anything like that. (At least, they haven’t contacted me; if David knows anything, then he isn’t telling me.) While it is not impossible that things may change in the future, absolutely nothing has happened thus far that would result in any change of the fate of this podcast. –Douglas

Tags: building, coming soon, community, fall, information, segment

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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.

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

Tags: community, discussion, episode, forums, MOD Team, phpBB.com, Styles, template inheritance, templates

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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.

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

Tags: Londonvasion, Paul, photos, phpBBHacks.com Idol, recap, Yuriy Rusko