The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

More than half a million websites have been compromised in a new round of attacks that hacked domains in order to infect unsuspecting users' PCs with a variety of trojans. This ongoing campaign includes new malware hosting domains and new trojans variations. All of the sites are running older or misconfigured versions of "phpBB," an open-source message forum manager. Open-source popular applications like phpBB tend to be often targeted by mass scanning and exploiting tools.

The hack redirected visitors through several steps ultimately ending up on a page that tried to take advantage of errors in older Internet Explorer and RealPlayer versions. The article talks about exactly which viruses could have caused the problems and the wide range of sites (both in topic and location) that were effected.

The best way to protect you and your PHPBB install from something like this happening is to get the latest version of the software and learn how to configure it correctly.

We are now live after much discussion and work internally with the first episode of the Official phpBB Podcast!

The first episode has been posted to the official podcast website and includes talk of browser cookies, COPA vs COPPA, jaber support, PHP5 support and board/category/forum/subforum differences.

You cna check out this latest podcast in this post or subscribe to their feed (either normally or in iTunes) to get this and future episodes.

During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we'll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will continue to work normally. As an example, I'll use the bgcanada.com/phpBB2, the board I volunteer to administrate.

The tutorial is broken up into sections:

• The plan
• New subdomains
• Creating a new template
• Moving CSS to an external file, merging
• Copying files to the new subdomains
• Serving gzipped content
• Turning ETags off
• Expires header
• Sysadmin summary

It looks like a lot of steps, but each section is relatively short and written well so as not to have more information than needed. In the end you'll have a simple template that uses Yahoo's 14 optimization rules to make things work that much faster.

The now newly independent phpBB still has the same active contributors and will continue to support the stable phpBB 2.0.x and develop the next-generation phpBB 3.0.x, with James having already allowed the transfer of the www.phpBB.com domain for a majority share of the financial assets that have been generated by the project via advertising to date, so as to minimize disruption to phpBB's users.

Development of the software and community around it will still continue - the only thing that will change is the name working as a figurehead of the group.

The option, 'All' has won hands-down with a majority of 20.6%. A contradicting result is seen as next to 'All' is the option 'None' with 12.7% votes. The third position goes to 'easy install and works with your existing board' as it has garnered 4.8% votes. The last on the list is 'topic URLS are dynamically converted to SEO friendly addresses' which has got a dismal 0.0%.

Be sure to check out this week's poll too - it asks for votes on which of the options is the most important feature of PHP 5. Options include "Better error handling", "Newer useful functions", and "Best OOP support period".

'CakePHP' has beaten all its competitors with a majority of 78.5% votes taking home the title of the best PHP MVC Framework. Next in line is 'Sympony' with 10.9 %votes.WACT, Achievo, PHPonTrax was last on the list as three of them garnered a dismal 0.0% votes each.

This week's poll looks at a different type of software - phpbb SEO Master - and asks which of the choices is the best benefit you and your application could benefit the most from. Head over and cast your vote today!

Recently, a new development version has been released (for testing purposes only), which has many new improvements over the current version (2.X). Today, I decided to install it on one of my development servers to find out if it really is worth the wait.

He lists the requirements and goes through a series of screenshots and descriptions of the new features including caching and the improvements to the moderation system.

The development of phpBB 3 has been past due for a long time. In my humble and not so educated opinion, it has faded (or if it hasn't already, it will fade) into obscurity. The phpBB 2.x development line has been overtaken by other forum projects, including better security in their package. SMF offers many of the features that will appear in phpBB 3 and also offers phpBB ease of installation and use.

He goes on to talk about the "upcoming release" of phpBB 3 but reminds us of the fact that it might be "another 2 or 3 years" before the update. If they ever get it out, though, (and it lives up to expectations) it'll be great.

Jacob then looks at FUDForum (a project involving Ilia Alshanetsky) and praises it for its integration skills and simplicity. It even includes APIs to help integrate the install of FUDForum with the databases from other popular message boards.

Finally the much awaited PHPBB Olympus is out as a public beta. In this review i am gonna list my experiences as i test fire the new beta.

Ok starting with a bit of history. I first tried phpbb 2 years back and i didn't like it at all. Now with Olympus i reckon we have some real good competetion. It might still not face up feature to feature with vbulletin, but its no pushover either. Considering its free and considering that it enjoys the support of an extensive modding community, i see great things happening with olympus.

They cover the normal flow of a user first installing the package:

• installation (of course)
• configuration
• the user control panel
• the overview and forum management sections
• user management
• attachment control
• styling options
• maintenance/system options
• viewing the forums/threads

Quite an exhaustive list, and for each item there's a brief bit of opinion by the reviewer on how good it was accomplished and a rating (out of ten) at the bottom of each page.