Wedge

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, as of September 2011, based upon the Noisen.com codebase -- a heavily modified SMF install. It has little bugs here and there but since we're planning to move it to use Wedge as soon as possible, we don't really focus on these details.
- The forum logo is a community effort led by Nao, with help from Bloc and CJ Jackson.
- The forum badges are 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.';

2 replies

- To give new life to SMF. While it was ahead of its time when it first came out many years ago, SMF is now behind the competition, because of the long development time for version 2, including a "feature frozen" state that lasted for over 3 years (an eternity on the Internet), and the many team changes. So many ideas were lost in the process.

- Leaving aside the feature set, Wedge is here to try new things, apply new strategies, new systems of thoughts to the SMF world. The way SMF is built and released works for some, but not for everyone. Hence:

* The developers are the project leaders, who share a common vision for Wedge. No team democracy means that you're under our control (insert evil laugh). It also means, more interestingly, that there's no one to stop us from realizing our vision, and the only pressure is the one that we put onto ourselves. (Unfortunately, we happen to be very demanding of ourselves.)

* Release cycle: SMF 1.x was great. However, it is also very static. This is probably due to the complexity of releasing new minor updates in packages that can be installed in one click. We do not plan to follow the same system. Instead, we would like to release full packages, without regard to minor or major releases, and release them early and often, as soon as the backbone for Wedge is solid enough. The idea is to make it easier for mods and themes to coexist with SMF without having to edit Wedge files, meaning that you can simply overwrite the files without losing your mods and themes. If you don't like this way of releasing new versions, you should use SMF 2.x instead, where the development team intents to keep releasing packages for minor updates.