phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:32:27
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