Then lately I been thinking more barebones, but then since I switched back to SMF to xenForo, back to SMF. I have mixed feelings.
Why did you come back from xenForo? I thought everyone loved it... (Except for me, but I haven't actually played with it much. Never bought it, never registered to a xf forum, etc.)It can sometimes be hard to decide what's bloat and what's not. I reckon it depends on what the goal of the software is.
Bloat = a load of extra features that are presented to you and you don't really need, and bother you more than anything.
How to avoid bloat? With one or several of these solutions:
1- Make sure the extra features don't make the software slower. If it's not possible, make sure they can be disabled, and that they don't slow it down if disabled.
2- Finetune the front-end and back-end interfaces to make sure they don't jump at the user or the admin. They should be there, but discrete. If someone doesn't want to use the feature, you shouldn't remind them that they are to use it.
3- Generally, make sure the feature is actually useful to at least a good portion of the community...!I personally would love to see wedge be more of a "community" software, and let the original SMF move forward being more of a bare-bones forum as they want.
It's not going to happen that way. Although it's likely (because SMF repeatedly said "we're just a forum", and we're saying the opposite), the SMF team and us aren't in touch, and we're not developing two opposing branches of the same software -- we're just developing them as we would LIKE it to be, while they're developing it as they THINK people would like it to be. That's a major difference. In our case, we may fail to attract a large user base, but we will definitely appeal to like-minded (perhaps more tech-savvy) people.With that in mind, I think it makes it easier to decide what's bloat and what's not. What should be maintained, and what should be left out.
We've already gotten rid of the majority of what we thought was unneeded. Pete had a lot of fun removing huge portions of SMF like support for PGSQL and SQLite, or PHP4, things like that. What was valid for SMF2 when it was built, isn't always valid 5 years later. Well, PGSQL and SQLite may be very well alive, but it's quite obvious at this point that people who use it, ALSO have a MySQL server installed somewhere, making it pointless to use PG or SQLite. Ultimately, that was a load of bloat. (The best example being the extra empty parameter at the beginning of each query... There's no logic in using global $smcFunc; $smcFunc['db_query']('', 'SELECT * FROM {db_prefix}table'); when you can achieve the same in Wedge using wesql::db_query('SELECT * FROM {db_prefix}');....)So Ultimately, I think wedge would be excellent with a blog/gallery added in, but more importantly extensive profiles.
We haven't started work yet on extended profiles. Blogs are underway, gallery is being developed in parallel and hopefully I'll start integrating it into Wedge soon. (I still have a few minor changes I need to do before I, ahem, break Aeva Media and Wedge altogether for the time it takes to make them behave.)Where those blogs and gallery pictures by the user can also be found in their profile.
Generally, just have a look at noisen.com and consider that all of its features will end up in Wedge one day or another --- because my goal is to switch Noisen to use Wedge, obviously. I have no commitments other than that. And it's already a lot -- took me a couple of years to refine Noisen to what it is, and it doesn't even need to be open to more server types... While Wedge needs to take all kinds of server setups into account.Allowing users to even use photos uploaded to the gallery for his or her blog(given permissions allow for it).
Well that's already in AeMe2...I think that's the way to go really, assuming it won't hit performance too hard.
There's a difference between a perceived performance hit, and an actual performance hit.
Just like jQuery: if you include it at the start of your source code, it will slow down your first page load. If you put it at the end, it won't slow down anything, even though it's the same code. jQuery is slower than native JS, but if you handle it correctly, it's fast enough. (e.g. if you're using jQuery discovery functions inside a large loop, you may wanna look into using native JS instead.)A couple of other things I'd like to see to make things more "community-like", is a rss feed poster. It makes it easier to get a community off it's feet, and keeps thing interesting if your power-posters turn up missing for a few days. But that's just me...
Yeah, never wrote that, never looked into it, but it's in my future plans. Far future though... Importing external data into a board (i.e. new topics each time) isn't my thing, though. If it were to be done, I'd give the ability to import into new posts inside a specific topic, things like that. Also -- importing and exporting in/from thoughts. (Kinda like my own tweeter/FB wall on noisen.com...)There are things I think should be taken out, or replaced. I think karma should be removed, and replaced with a thumbsup and/or thumbsdown. Facebook uses the "like" system, and xenForo has adopted it and it works very well for everyone.
Karma was removed long ago from Wedge. The Like system isn't implemented yet because we're unsure how BEST to implement it -- i.e. it should be extremely flexible and would be handled as part of our floating topic system (more on that later... Well, if we end up discussing it publicly at least.)Don't get me wrong, I don't what anyone to think I'm jumping in and trying to say it should be like this or like that. I am simply requesting that it be looked at and discussed among the professionals. I don't think it hurts to bounce ideas around or off each other. That's how ideas evolve and become something great and innovative.
Well, if you look closely, you'll see that Wedge.org has got over 10k posts since its inception... Meaning we definitely talk a lot ;) Only, in private. Many of the things you mentioned were discussed over at the private area, really.Also, I have to ask. Is a block placement/portal being considered?
Not by me, I'm not a big fan of portals (having never used one more than 10 minutes.)
However, I made it extremely easy to add code to the sidebar (Wedge has a 'mandatory' non-intrusive sidebar.)
It's just a matter of sending a call to showSubTemplate('my_function', 'sidebar'). Really, piece of cake.
(BTW, note to Pete: the function that shows the sub-template is loadSubTemplate while the function that just loads it for later use is showSubTemplate... Although it does make sense when reading the source code especially next to loadTemplate calls, it's kinda awkward when you come to think of it :lol: Maybe I should do an automatic search & replace to swap the names...?)
Posted: March 28th, 2011, 12:37 PM
Re: RSS feed and extended profiles... Just a quick Google search on your made me understand(http://inspireromance.com/SMF/index.php?board=1.0) :angel: