Last week, some six dozen people, invited guests, interested users, and team members gathered in New York City’s Times Square to talk phpBB.

I’ll steal one of Douglas’s moments of zen from his concluding talk. He posed the question Why are you here?, and received responses such as the following:
– To dedicate some time to working on phpBB
– To meet the people with whom I work on a daily basis
– To reconnect with the community after a lengthy absence
(The complete set will be available in a few days when video of the talks is published)

One of my favorite stories came from a gentleman whose name I’ve forgotten who had used phpBB several years ago. When he heard that phpBB was looking at Symfony2 for the backbone of phpBB4, he decided to check phpBB out again.

In other ways, a personal gathering is a nice way to make decisions. From my (development) point of view, it was great to review an old bug, write a patch, and get feedback from five people in five minutes. Other team members probably have other examples to share.

A fair majority of the time was spent in informal gathering, whether at the capstone social event at Thalia (the menu is definitely worth a try) or in the hotel conference room working on our own little projects.
In the end, we ended up with a better idea of what everyone else is working on, a better understanding of Symfony and Doctrine (with multiple talks devoted to them), and new ideas created during conversation.

I’d be remiss without sending a kudo to Marshalrusty (a.k.a Yuriy Rusko) for taking care of the preliminary setup and planning.

As we’ve said before, phpBB is getting hooked. Now, we need your help to determine at which points in the code hooks are required to make MODs easier to create and install.

MODs are what makes phpBB work. Without MODs, it would not be the community or the software that it is. However, there is a downside. At the moment, most MODs have to alter the actual code of the software making it hard to install updates or other MODs. Hence, we want to make this a thing of the past: phpBB is getting hooked.

Hooks are in themselves a simple concept: at certain places it is possible to hook into the code, altering the behavior of the software. Where exactly these places are and what change to the behaviour they incur is up to you. We need your help in deciding this.

The hook concept of phpBB 3.1 is based on the idea of “automagic” hooks, replacing the wrapping hooks used in 3.0. If your MOD implements a method matching the hook’s name, phpBB will invoke it at the appropriate places. Even more, MODs can introduce their own hooks, making it possible to MOD the MOD.

However, just being called is just half the solution. A hook also needs semantics, telling phpBB what to do with the results. Thus, hooks can have many different roles. They might be used to register a callback, or they might be used to just add output. Or to change results. Or to alter a query. Etc. We need your ideas to make this great.
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