What Do You Not Like About phpBB Weekly?

[webmacster87]

Okay, what is this topic about? Well, David and I and a few people have been privately chatting a bit about the future of this show. Although phpBB Weekly continues to do well, we are kind of recognizing that the show has gotten into a bit of a rut this past year. The main reason for this was David's absence from the show in the first half of the year, followed by the complete upheaval of my life with my college move in the second half of the year.

However, with the start of a new year and a new season comes a fantastic opportunity to revitalize, and that's what we want to do for the start of our 2010 season. Next week we will be making some revisions to our website and announcing some structural changes to phpBB Weekly to help us get back to a place where we can really be proud of this podcast, and encourage more people to subscribe, listen live, and become an active member of our phpBB Weekly community.

But we would like to get some input from you all on what we could be doing better. So please, unload all of your constructive criticism of our show right here. I don't care how minor you may think your complaint is; it will help us make phpBB Weekly a better show. Granted, we may not necessarily follow every suggestion we receive, but there's absolutely no harm in bringing a concern of yours to our attention.

We've said since we started this show three years ago that we want this podcast to represent the interests of the phpBB community, so please take advantage of this topic to let us know what we could be doing better, and we'll do our best to address your criticisms as we plan for our 2010 season. Thanks!

[Obsidian]

The awkward moments are very awkward, and David needs to get an alarm clock. Bad.

[Highway of Life]

Is that the only two episodes you listened to?

[Obsidian]

Heavens no. Every time in IRC, it's "<FountainOfApples> Where is David?" or "<FountainOfApples> Anybody seen Highway_of_Life?"

[Highway of Life]

If he stopped asking that in IRC while I am sleeping, that wouldn’t be an issue, now would it?

[webmacster87]

David has admittedly gotten a bit better at actually showing up recently. That particular time this fall when David completely missed an episode was when he set his alarm to PM instead of AM. I've done that a few times myself. What I did find surprising is that he slept past 10 AM; I mean we did make the show an hour later after all...

But let's not spend the whole topic focusing on David's sleeping habits.

[webmacster87]

Apparently y'all think the show is just hunky dory...

[Kane Kane]

I wouldn't mind hearing more discussions about styling phpBB

I've been very tempted to dive into structurally redesigning and releasing phpBB styles to encourage other style authors to explore what can be done other than changing simple .css and images. In the latest podcast I just listened to, you aired a clip from the talk with the designer of subsilver and prosilver and I found it interesting that probably 99% of the styles released for the public remained almost identical to his original ideas. I thought to myself and tried to figure out the probability that his vision for the entire layout being so fantastic that no one has ever even considered changing things up a bit. It was even mentioned that other forum softwares were following in his footsteps. I wondered if maybe it was too hard for people to do or maybe no one really understands the structure well enough to change it.

I wonder how welcome a major reconstruction would even be to the public. What kind of effect would it have on mod authors that base their mod's install instructions on prosilver and subsilver? Would it make your style virtually unusable my the majority of the people that use phpBB?

Anyway, as a style author who has built plenty of styles in the past and is about to start cranking them out again, I definitely wouldn't mind hearing a lot more discussion about styling and what the community is looking for now-a-days. Styling in general seems to have come to a very slow crawl lately and though I've been gone for over a year, I don't really understand why... it was booming when I left.

Oh... and more Lorelle VanFossen

[webmacster87]

Definitely agree with you there. The last two times we talked about styles were on episodes #075 and #118; we owe them some more respect and we'll try to make up for it this year.

And as for Lorelle, I was wondering how long it'd be before someone made that request on here...

[Obsidian]

I wonder how welcome a major reconstruction would even be to the public. What kind of effect would it have on mod authors that base their mod's install instructions on prosilver and subsilver? Would it make your style virtually unusable my the majority of the people that use phpBB?

Until MOD authors took notice of the new style-base, and wrote templates/theme alterations and expansions accordingly, yes, unless they who are installing the MOD can adapt the MOD's code to the new style-base.

Just keep in mind, you're pretty restricted with the inflexible nature of the template vars.