Marshalrusty has opened the conference and we are moving forward. Acyd Burn is the first presenter and he reviewed the history of phpBB from 1.x to 3.0. He has introduced the entire dev team (except Vic, who is not here) and is now talking about the development process for 3.2 as well as some general process changes. It shoulds like things are going to be more organized and therefore more productive.

When you have a volunteer development team, being organized and efficient has to feel good.

There have been a number of questions from the audience; I think the ability to ask the dev team specific questions about current and future code is really being appreciated by the group here.

3.2 is going to implement memory caching which will extend the file (disk) caching present in 3.0. They are (it sounds like) completely reworking the BBCode system. For example, there will not be any standard BBCode values anymore; everything including the former “standard” codes like bold and so on will be implemented as custom codes, which means that there’s only one process. There will be an option to configure which codes can be nested. That would mean you could enable smileys within the code bbcode, if you really wanted to. Or at least that’s the way I understood it.

One of the very interesting concepts for 3.2 is the new event / trigger system. This was originally a community coding project for 2.x, and I guess was left out of 3.0 for time reasons. But it looks like 3.2 will include it. The system will be composed of three components: a trigger, a condition, and the action. The trigger is what starts the process, the condition is used to test whether some action will be taken, and then the action is, well, what happens.

So this could be used to replace an “Auto Group” MOD, where the trigger is a change in post count, the condition is an increase or decrease above or below a threshold, and the action is to add or remove from a group. Another example was automatically locking a post based on certain keywords present in the subject line. It sounds complicated, but interesting.

A question was just asked as to whether we would be able to add our own triggers, and the answer was positive. So that sounds really interesting. Triggers can also start other triggers, so you could end up with a cascading series of events. That sounds scary. Hopefully they’ll include some sort of stack call limit to prevent a runaway process.

I asked about search, and it seems that the sphinx search engine is close, and would be in 3.2. That will be something that I am very interested to watch.

Acyd is wrapping up, so I will post this and see what’s coming next.

Wow, here we are at the world’s first phpBB hosted conference. Woot! Things are a bit hectic starting, which is probably to be expected since many of us haven’t done this sort of thing before. We’re in a really nice hotel facility that Marshalrusty checked out for us. It turns out that many of the team members are just as crazy as I am.

That’s scary.

Right now cherokee red is being plastered with Bertie stickers since nobody brought an actual Bertie suit. I am sure there will be pictures at phpbb.com later on.

Meanwhile as the entertainment is going on we’re trying to get our hardware set up to video the event as well as making sure the wireless (which I am using as I type this) is up and available for everyone. I think Marshalrusty will be kicking off the ceremonies soon, and Acyd Burn will be running through the first talk which is about the history and background of phpBB.

Should be great. Stay tuned for more details as the day progresses.

Today we had team meetings, which means for the most part I can’t say anything or I’ll have to pull a James Bond on you. (Hey, we’re in London, I have to make a Bond reference, it’s like the law or something. ) I can say that there are some interesting things that were discussed that I believe will be well received by the general community.

I can also say that the wireless access from our meeting room today was less than optimal. I am really hoping that the meeting room tomorrow will have much better results so I can add blog posts throughout the day, which is what I had intended to do. I guess if you don’t see anything further from me until tomorrow night, one of two things has happened. Either the network access failed, or Bond has taken me out.

My flight was good, and I’ve already managed to hook up with NeoThermic, Marshalrusty, lurttinen, AdamR, and bunch of other folks. We talked about camera stuff. Today is going to be a bit hectic as I am still trying to finish out some work (real work) as well as enjoy meeting the folks that I’ve interacted with for the past six years.

I have two main projects going on in real life. I have three main projects going on related phpBB, and a few minor ones as well. I have a lawn that hasn’t been mowed in a month. I have a sprinkler system that has a leak. I have a car with an inspection sticker that is over a month out of date.

And I have a ticket to London, leaving on a flight in a few hours. At least I have my priorities straight…

Until I leave for Londonvasion, 2008. I’m excited to go for several reasons. First, I get to meet (in person) more of the phpBB team members. Second, I get to go to London. I’ve been there once before, but didn’t have much time to tour. Hm. Well, I won’t have much time to tour this time either, but I’ll do some.

But the best part will be the actual presentations on Sunday. We’re supposed to be able to get wireless access at the hotel where the conference is being held, and I plan to do some “live blogs” from the event. I’ve tried doing it before, and it’s hard to be inconspicuous. I type really fast, and that tends to make a decent bit of noise, and some folks around me get irritated. So I will either have to type in stealth mode or I’ll do my blogging between events.

In honor of the occasion, I’ve added a brand new blog category: Londonvasion 2008. That way you can easily pull up the posts related to the event.

We’ll see how it goes.