Wedge

It is friendly -- to end users and anyone who happily embraces the software. It may be seen as a hostile fork of SMF, though, in the sense that currently the license we chose is set to prevent SMF from re-using our implementations. Our choice of license was dictated by a few events that, while regrettable in a sense, contributed to the birth of Wedge, and its subsequent good health.

In the first two months of the project lifetime, while we were building Wedge in private, we were in touch with the SMF team and were providing bug reports and fixes that we had done in Wedge. At the time, we thought of Wedge as a "laboratory" to allow experimenting outside of the SMF codebase. Our new code was supposed to be able to be merged back into the SMF codebase.

However, after more internal conflicts with the team, we decided that the SMF team didn't do anything to deserve our help. While we can understand that many people might have thought that our apparent leaving of the active SMF community might be reason enough to blame us for whatever conflict happened between the SMF team and us, fact is, we *were* active, and actually way more active than the SMF team itself, providing many, many bug fixes and helping speed up the releases of SMF 2.0 RC4 and RC5 among other things.

In the future, when Wedge is stable enough, then we will reconsider what our final license is. But as much as we'd like to license our code as BSD, it is unlikely to happen until we feel comfortable sharing more than a few fixes with the SMF team again. I guess we can say the ball is in their camp at this point. :)

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This is a very tough question to answer. Certainly there are a lot of features in Wedge that many will not use - not every forum owner wants to have a blog system built in, for example. Nor the calendar, nor <insert feature here>

But big features like that - like blogging support, like the gallery, like the calendar - these are features we have in the core so that we can maintain them. All too often mods get neglected over time - having them in the core means they don't get forgotten about.

The calendar is a particularly odd example: many SMF users didn't want the calendar in the core, it being a feature they didn't use. But there is another group of people who would actually go elsewhere if the calendar were removed/left to be neglected. These people love having it available and want it to be more powerful than it was.

So the approach we've gone for is that we've added these features in, but in a way that we hope doesn't make it feel too big or scary - and kept the performance aspect too.


Interesting parallel, really, is Microsoft Word. Word adds new features every release, and while some consider it bloaty, the bottom line is that any user might only use 10% of its features - but if each user uses a different 10%, it caters to a lot more people as a result - and this is something we've tried to keep in mind.

We're not going to add every little thing we've thought of - and there are plenty of things we've rejected from being in the core for just that reason. But the goal we have is to make it easier to make them as add-ons that 'just work' and require little maintenance over time.

What will likely happen is that once the core is stable and the ability to expand it through add-ons is mature enough, I'll start turning some of the 'would be nice to have, but not in core' things into add-ons, but we'll see how that turns out - it really requires the core to be mature enough to achieve that first.

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The Friend group is not an "elite" group, it's just a private group of people who freely discuss the project and share sensible material about it. Because we can't (and don't really want to) release everything to the public right now, we're trying to keep our numbers low. Basically, the more committed you are to discussing Wedge, the more likely you are to catch our attention. If we already know you well, chances are we forgot to invite you. Just ask for it then.
Please note that if you are to become a 'Friend', you'll have to sacrifice your firstborn to us, and promise you won't discuss anything private outside of our private boards.

Our intention is to make as much as possible (90%+) of the currently private content, an actual part of the public area once we can safely release it. Among other things, we will publish discussions about features that ended up not being implemented, in case you want to make your opinion known.

Currently, Wedge is developed by its creators and project managers.

* Peter Spicer ("Arantor") is the creator and main developer of SimpleDesk. He's also one of the better known SMF community members, having posted more messages than anyone else in the boards, mainly as a project helper. He's so smart it's scary, he's nice, he's everywhere, he figures out solutions to problems before they even arise, he collects dragon toys, he's got a cool name and, more importantly, he's on fire.

* René-Gilles Deberdt ("Nao") is the main developer of Aeva Media, the most downloaded mod for SMF. He's doing his best to be a bigger drama queen than Arantor. He's got a weird name, he's so monomaniac he scares himself (90+ releases of Aeva Media in 2 years), and he's old and grumpy, and it's not getting any better. And, more importantly, he can move his ears and has mismatched pinkies.

Who does what?

Working on such a large codebase allows us to specialize in different areas, generally our areas of expertise or simply what we're interested on at the time. We both have a huge to-do list and they mostly don't overlap. Arantor is specialized in innovation, reworking the admin area and rewriting the add-on manager. Nao's main interests are in user experience, writing tools to make a designer's life easier, designing stuff in general, the media gallery which he built before working on Wedge, etc.
To simplify, one could say that Arantor is in charge of the backend while Nao is the frontend developer, but it wouldn't exactly be true, as we both do a little bit of each, and we also tend to look into each other's work and suggest improvements or fix tiny bugs here and there. What we learned after a year of development, though, is that right from day one, we got together pretty well and we've been very happy with our collaborative work.
We certainly hope it shows in the software itself!

Website credits

- The website itself is using Wedge as its platform, as logic would dictate.
- The forum logo is a community effort led by Nao, with help from Bloc and CJ Jackson.
- The forum badges are loosely inspired by earlier SMF badges created by Gazmanafc.

Wanna join the team?

Not for now, we're afraid. We will announce any team additions and changes here in the future. Please do not offer your help here or anywhere else. Right now we prefer to keep the team as small as possible. Of course, we always accept suggestions with pleasure, but we'll do the coding by ourselves. echo 'We like that.';

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