Wedge
Public area => Features => The Pub => Features: Theming => Topic started by: Nao on May 7th, 2011, 01:04 PM
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Feature: Permanent sidebar
Developer: Nao
Target: users, modders, themers
Status: 100% (complete; might need to add features in the future.)
Comment:
This is one of our most controversial moves. Well, maybe not, but at least one that could be questioned.
Basically, Wedge now always shows a sidebar on the page, and moves it to the bottom if the page is too narrow. It systematically shows your user box (hello user, date, avatar, unread posts, unread replies) at the top, and RSS links at the bottom, and then adds contextual data based on the current page. Calendar pages show day links in the sidebar. Media item pages may show item details in the sidebar (although they'll usually use their own additional sidebar.) Dropdown menus may be moved to the sidebar... Things like that.
In addition, modders can easily add any kind of block to the sidebar by calling loadBlock('my_block_function', ':side'). The same can be done with the top template, which is a series of blocks (sub-templates) that are called before the main template is actually shown, allowing you to add important information at the top without reorganizing everything.
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Does that mean that creating blocks will be easier? Like a protal or something?
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I have no idea. I wrote the sidebar code and loadSubTemplate, but I never, ever ever touched a single portal mod. So I have no idea what they do with 'blocks', how they do it, etc. It's just not my thing. I'm just saying it's easy to add sections to the sidebar (or anywhere else really.)
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Does that mean that creating blocks will be easier? Like a protal or something?
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Oooh... Even though I don't think is neccesary considering wedge will have a blog (and I figure you can use it as a standalone thingy).
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Some people will think it's not necessary that Wedge has a forum system, you know :P
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Then it will become a... CMS?
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CMS = content management system
Wedge is already this.
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But shhhh, apparently SMF users don't like the term ;)
And to me, a CMS is a tool that helps web agencies build quick websites with pages and such. (Basically, a copy of SMF with a portal is a CMS.) But that's because I read .net Magazine too much :P
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.net calls WordPress a CMS... but that doesn't really seem right to me :P
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I don't know, I think I've seen enough sites that use WP as a CMS and many of them 'feel' like they're built upon a CMS, yes.
Only, it's not a proper CMS in the sense that it wasn't originally built as one. It's only be turned into a CMS these last few years. Just like Wedge may become a full-fledged, but not 'proper', CMS in the future.
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I dunno, it feels like they keep trying to sell it as an 'out of the box' CMS when it really isn't up to that task. It's that slightly holier-than-thou attitude that keeps discouraging me from subscribing, even though I bought the last couple.
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Tell you that. Just try reading Web design magazine or whatever, forgot the exact name. It'll make you subscribe to .net in a second :P
Although I'm so addicted to these magazines, I'm considering subscribing to the other crap, just to have some more reading material. (It's that, or I'll spend more time watching South Park.)
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Mmm, I don't know if a forum can actually *manage* content... I see that as something complicated IMO.
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It's often all about offering to use custom fields inside posts (text items.)
With this, you can do a lot. And I'm sure we'll end up doing that in Wedge. We already have tags under the hand -- technically it's a custom field...
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Specifically, it's a single purpose custom field, you can't readily use it for anything other than tags.
Custom fields attached to a post can be awfully tricky to make work, actually... it's been one of the banes of my work on SimpleDesk recently, and it's not something I'm overly keen on reintroducing over here because it makes everything that much more complex.
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That much? :unsure:
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Yeah, because SimpleDesk's is massively complicated. Let me explain why:
* Fields can be attached to tickets and/or replies, or both.
* Fields that are attached to tickets can be displayed on the left under the ticket information, just above the replies, or as a prefix to the ticket title.
* Fields can be configured to be visible and editable by user/staff/admin (by role), so you can have fields that are hidden from regular users but visible to staff and editable only by admins, for example.
* Changes to custom fields are logged in the action log.
* Text, large text, integer, floating point number, select/dropdown, radio buttons, checkboxes and multi-select are supported (multi-select is not finished yet)
* This all needs to support being moved from ticket to topic, that's not implemented yet.
* Fields can be configured separately per department (analogous to per-board settings, yes SD has department support now)
It really isn't pretty. Implementing that in Wedge, well we'd do it more simply because the needs are physically simpler (the visibility and logging complexity can be streamlined or even removed, as can a few other things)
(Did I mention that SimpleDesk 2.0 is a monster, that's grown 5k lines of code since just mid March?)
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interesting. its certainly effective, and solves some big critisisms of smf. Like the ease in which it drops to the bottom on more narrow screens, tablets etc. My only decision would were i put those lovely google ads i depend on to cover my server costs. :D
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Wait.... sidebars are/will be permanent???
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Wait.... sidebars are/will be permanent???
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Damn. This is a huge disappointment and a case in point why coders shouldn't make design decisions. We tried to place a sidebar on our forum and we had a revolt. I'm not going to be able to port to Wedge. Dammit dammit dammit.
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Lulz. You realize it's free software right?
The only problem with sidebars is when you reduce the window width.
Try it with Wedge. It just works.
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We have a lot of older members who want the width of their display, so sidebar is a nogo. Also, it makes no sense to have a sidebar if you have a few items because it's empty when you scroll down.
yes, I know it's free.
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I am posting on an ipad I like weaving better then wireless, the sidebar falls to the bottom of the page. On my secondary computer on my TV I zoom in and the sidebar goes to the bottom of the page. My main computer the sidebar is on the side, and thank goodness for that because if the post was full width readability would be horrid. Heck with a custom theme you just move the positson of the sidebar.
Oh and haha to coders shouldn't make design decisions that is funny :) Thank you for the laugh.
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How is reading the width of the display bad readability?
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How is reading the width of the display bad readability?
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We have a lot of older members who want the width of their display, so sidebar is a nogo. Also, it makes no sense to have a sidebar if you have a few items because it's empty when you scroll down.
yes, I know it's free.
Nowadays, new monitors tend to be 23'' or more, with full HD resolutions or better. Early websites were built with a 800x600 resolution in mind, and for many, many years, webmasters would keep it readable in 800x600 even with higher resolutions around. Then mobile browsing was born, and with it the need to be even more readable in very low resolutions (e.g. even if your mobile phone has a HD resolution like mine, on a non-optimized page text is really not readable without zooming, so you need to take care of that).
Thus, the solution I chose for Wedge:
- Ensuring that at very wide resolutions, we don't get a totally different experience, and yet make use of the extra space. This is accomplished by adding a sidebar.
- Ensuring that very narrow resolutions look good, This is done by dynamically moving the sidebar to the bottom of the screen when the 'declared' resolution is below 1024x768 (or including it, I'm not sure anymore).
Do you see many people complaining that Facebook has TWO sidebars...? I've never seen anyone ask for them to remove even one...!
Just because other forums don't have a sidebar by default doesn't mean we should do the same. I'm the one who pushed for Wedge's sidebar to be not only default, but also non-removable (i.e. at best it's moved to the bottom and reflowed.)
I guess someone could write a plugin to get rid of the sidebar. But what's the point. You just lose information.
You're free to whip up a quick custom skin that moves sidebars to the bottom permanently. It's really easy to do. It's just not recommended.
@godboko, I don't understand your problem with Wireless...? That skin is pretty much the same as Weaving, the only different is that it enables Mobile mode, i.e. sets a meta viewport to tell the browser the ideal starting dimensions.
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Depends upon the width, I have 24" monitors and it gets ridiculous.
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That's their problem.
Nowadays, new monitors tend to be 23'' or more, with full HD resolutions or better. Early websites were built with a 800x600 resolution in mind, and for many, many years, webmasters would keep it readable in 800x600 even with higher resolutions around. Then mobile browsing was born, and with it the need to be even more readable in very low resolutions (e.g. even if your mobile phone has a HD resolution like mine, on a non-optimized page text is really not readable without zooming, so you need to take care of that).
Thus, the solution I chose for Wedge:
- Ensuring that at very wide resolutions, we don't get a totally different experience, and yet make use of the extra space. This is accomplished by adding a sidebar.
- Ensuring that very narrow resolutions look good, This is done by dynamically moving the sidebar to the bottom of the screen when the 'declared' resolution is below 1024x768 (or including it, I'm not sure anymore).
Do you see many people complaining that Facebook has TWO sidebars...? I've never seen anyone ask for them to remove even one...!
Just because other forums don't have a sidebar by default doesn't mean we should do the same.
I'm the one who pushed for Wedge's sidebar to be not only default, but also non-removable (i.e. at best it's moved to the bottom and reflowed.)
I guess someone could write a plugin to get rid of the sidebar. But what's the point. You just lose information.
You're free to whip up a quick custom skin that moves sidebars to the bottom permanently. It's really easy to do. It's just not recommended.
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Wait till you try it on a Retina iPad. That's even more surreal because it doesn't use full width of the screen AND has the sidebar.
Gotta say, your enthusiasm will be missed, but don't let the door hit you on the way out. We happen to like how it works and don't really want to change that. As for "providing choice" every choice slows it down.
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Now I'm not tablet constrained, I'll explain a bit further.
1. You're pretty much the only person that's complained about it in the 10 months we've been using a sidebar on this site. It is somewhat rude to barge in and demand we change it just for you. If you were part of a majority that demanded it, we might reconsider, but I doubt it.
2. There is such a thing as optimum reading width - note that most books are of a fairly standard size, and even when they're not, the text is still set to roughly the same number of words per line and per page, just with bigger writing. I wonder why that is... could it be that they understand people best respond to a certain number of words on a page at a time? Having very wide screens is more tiring on the eyes and the brain than having shorter lines.
3. I respect that you have a list of requirements that you have to be seen to follow. Barging in here and expecting that we follow your to-do list is not going to happen. More importantly though, there's actually very little fundamentally wrong with SMF - if it's working for you, stick with it, you don't have to upgrade past 2.0.x if you're happy with it. There are plenty of people still using SMF 1.1.x which debuted 7 years ago. (And what about all the people who still use Windows XP which debuted just over 11 years ago?) You don't have to have the latest and greatest, and it seems to me that you're looking to move on from SMF because you think you're missing out, rather than because it doesn't do the things you need.
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Like Pete said.
There are liquid layouts and fixed layouts. Both have their advantages. Most forums use liquid layouts, but the smarter solution is to use a liquid layout with a fixed maximum width. This is what Wedge does. In addition to that, we add a sidebar to make more use of the available space -- but if there isn't enough space, we moved the sidebar to the bottom. I worked very, VERY hard on making the sidebar as useful and unintrusive as possible. No one can possibly say that the sidebar on wedge.org is bothersome or whatever. So it stays where it is.
I don't get people who complain that something is done one way and they can't disable it, but they won't even consider doing something very simple like creating a sidebar-less skin for their forum. (Which is probably when they realize they don't really need it.)
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I don't get people who complain that something is done one way and they can't disable it, but they won't even consider doing something very simple like creating a sidebar-less skin for their forum. (Which is probably when they realize they don't really need it.)
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I don't get people who complain that something is done one way and they can't disable it, but they won't even consider doing something very simple like creating a sidebar-less skin for their forum. (Which is probably when they realize they don't really need it.)
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In which case some stuff that expects the sidebar should be able to detect if there is one and appropriately either drop their content (and not go through the queries etc.) or reposition it elsewhere.
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In which case some stuff that expects the sidebar should be able to detect if there is one and appropriately either drop their content (and not go through the queries etc.) or reposition it elsewhere.
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Nao nothing wrong with wireless, it's just a personal choice. Weavings text is just slightly larger and I prefer that over wireless. I was just pointing out that a the themes released now are pretty flexible, and b the sidebar can be moved with a custom theme. Basically that core functionality doesn't have to be changed for one forums "needs."
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Now I'm not tablet constrained, I'll explain a bit further.
1. You're pretty much the only person that's complained about it in the 10 months we've been using a sidebar on this site. It is somewhat rude to barge in and demand we change it just for you. If you were part of a majority that demanded it, we might reconsider, but I doubt it.
2. There is such a thing as optimum reading width - note that most books are of a fairly standard size, and even when they're not, the text is still set to roughly the same number of words per line and per page, just with bigger writing. I wonder why that is... could it be that they understand people best respond to a certain number of words on a page at a time? Having very wide screens is more tiring on the eyes and the brain than having shorter lines.
3. I respect that you have a list of requirements that you have to be seen to follow. Barging in here and expecting that we follow your to-do list is not going to happen.
More importantly though, there's actually very little fundamentally wrong with SMF - if it's working for you, stick with it, you don't have to upgrade past 2.0.x if you're happy with it. There are plenty of people still using SMF 1.1.x which debuted 7 years ago. (And what about all the people who still use Windows XP which debuted just over 11 years ago?) You don't have to have the latest and greatest, and it seems to me that you're looking to move on from SMF because you think you're missing out, rather than because it doesn't do the things you need.
And I was expecting that "just go stay with SMF if you don't like how we do it". No. I'm going to have to find another forum platform, like vBulliten or something, which I'm certain I will hate. We just got the latest SMF update a few weeks ago or so, and the one before that was a year ago. That is insane, and isn't me "wanting to stay with the latest and greatest".
As for the latest and greatest, don't get too ahead of yourself. It took you 2.5 years to get to alpha. Obama may be in his 3rd term by the time this gets to beta. v1.0 stable compared to current alpha is going to be a generation apart. Why you don't have more help is beyond me, but whatever. It tells me this project is more of a hobby, which is fine, but you should tell people that up front. I found this forum because you announced to the heavens that SMF was ignoring you guys and treating you bad, so you were forking. Then I come on here, fall in love with what you guys are doing, simpy ask "gosh, can we just have a hide option for the sidebar if we want", and I get told to go jump in a lake, like they did to you, for my "demands". Everything you guys said about display is correct, and again, I don't mind a sidebar (filled with content that I want). I have a forum with a lot of old people who have small monitors from the 1990s and CTRL-+ their displays to where their scrollbars have scrollbars. I tried to place a sidebar to display our friend forums, and they almost came after me with pitchforks. I didn't expect our forum would be growing like it is, hence why I'm looking at other options now. I got tasked with handling the tech side of it because of my expertise, so I'm just trying to find the best option, which this is. Anyway, I'm not asking for schema changes and major refactoring. I'm asking for a little checkbox that tells the rendering to just not display the sidebar.
Nevertheless, I'm going to pop in and keep up with the project, and I'm going to tell folks about this project who are looking for a new forum. Ironically, by the time you get this to v1.0, the old folks who don't want sidebars may have died off at that point, so it may work itself out.
By the way, can we have more than one sidebar?
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I'm pleading and arguing against it. It's your project -- I haven't "demanded" anything.
Not at all. For example, my favorite laptop that I use most of the time (my 17"), I bought in 2004. I'm a buy and hold type of guy. I, actually, _want_ a system that I can let run forever and just update as updates come along. I love software and systems that stand the test of time.
No. I'm going to have to find another forum platform, like vBulliten or something, which I'm certain I will hate. We just got the latest SMF update a few weeks ago or so, and the one before that was a year ago. That is insane, and isn't me "wanting to stay with the latest and greatest".
So I will say it again. Why are you upgrading? Are you doing it to get features you don't currently have, or because you perceive there to be a problem with the platform (that doesn't really exist)?As for the latest and greatest, don't get too ahead of yourself. It took you 2.5 years to get to alpha.
Why you don't have more help is beyond me, but whatever.
It tells me this project is more of a hobby, which is fine, but you should tell people that up front.
Then I come on here, fall in love with what you guys are doing, simpy ask "gosh, can we just have a hide option for the sidebar if we want", and I get told to go jump in a lake, like they did to you, for my "demands"
Secondly, more importantly, let me take that concept for a moment: hiding the sidebar. Yes, you can hide the sidebar. Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways of doing it. Neither of them offer a nice cosy admin panel option for it, but it's doable - and it will have a lot of side consequences to doing it.
You're a programmer, you should understand better than most that these things rarely live in a vacuum, and that one thing often has a great many consequences.
But here's the other thing: many more people ask about putting a sidebar onto a forum, than ask about taking one off. You're the first person in 2.5 years to complain about the fact we have a sidebar. I'd argue we're doing a better job of catering to what people want than complying with every little whim that people ask us about.
But yes, just for you, I'm sure I could hack up a plugin that hides the sidebar, because I love hearing support requests.
There is also a big difference between ignoring people and taking on board what they're saying but disagreeing. I hear your objections to the sidebar. I disagree, I have also explained why I disagree. It doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the fact you don't like the sidebar, but the thing is, we're not trying to build your perfect software. We're trying to build OUR perfect software, and that doesn't mean catering to your exact requests.
In SMF's case, they weren't particularly interested in what we had to say, despite being more than just community members. Nao worked on the single most popular SMF mod, plus contributed hundreds of bug reports. I wrote their bug tracker, spent months reviewing community mod submissions and did literally thousands of support topics, and both of us were almost on the SMF development team in one way or another. I'd say that would tend to qualify us for having some say in how things are run, yes?
(Also note that 2.1 is only just into alpha, with far less changes than we've made, and a new development team since 2.0 final was released. And even then, the 2.0 / 2.1 dev team has forked off into their own software. Because the team fundamentally is toxic, it continually pushes out the people who have the drive to actually do anything.)I'm asking for a little checkbox that tells the rendering to just not display the sidebar.
So you hide the sidebar. You now have to process that decision on every page, in a way that you don't currently. We also need to rewrite everywhere that pushes content into the sidebar, to now not push it into the sidebar, which means we have to find somewhere else to put it. Which in half the cases is also going to mean writing new templates for them to now be horizontally arranged rather than vertically stacked, or just simply not performing the queries for it in the first place.
This also means that the plugins that already exist which use the sidebar (several come to mind) will all need to be heavily modified to do all the same logic, turning one into two or even three states (on/sidebar, on/elsewhere, off). All because you want an option to turn something off.
That's what I mean about consequences - to you, it's one line of HTML, to us it's at least a day's work, and frankly, I've got far more important things to be doing for Wedge's benefit like finishing the things that I've started.By the way, can we have more than one sidebar?
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The words do not come across as a request. Flat out insults do not usually come as part of nice requests.
SMF 2.0 went to a stable release a while ago, the updates since then have been security updates only. That's a sign of quality, not poor development, that it has only needed 3 patches of any kind since 'stable' release.
So I will say it again. Why are you upgrading? Are you doing it to get features you don't currently have, or because you perceive there to be a problem with the platform (that doesn't really exist)?
I'm reasonably comfortable with the speed of our development. Getting snippy about that isn't winning you any fans.
Because we learned the hard way what happens when you have too many people chiming in with their say. It's largely what's killing SMF, though not nearly the only thing.
Where have we ever said it is anything else? We're not charging you for anything. We're not demanding anything from you. We're doing what we've always done, what we've always said we're doing, which is building it for us, and being nice enough to check with people that they're happy to use what we're doing in the process.
There's a lot more to it than that. Firstly, as explained, there are logistical and practical reasons for having the sidebar - preventing the content taking full width modest-and-up screens is one of them.
Secondly, more importantly, let me take that concept for a moment: hiding the sidebar. Yes, you can hide the sidebar. Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways of doing it. Neither of them offer a nice cosy admin panel option for it, but it's doable - and it will have a lot of side consequences to doing it.
You're a programmer, you should understand better than most that these things rarely live in a vacuum, and that one thing often has a great many consequences.
But here's the other thing: many more people ask about putting a sidebar onto a forum, than ask about taking one off. You're the first person in 2.5 years to complain about the fact we have a sidebar. I'd argue we're doing a better job of catering to what people want than complying with every little whim that people ask us about.
But yes, just for you, I'm sure I could hack up a plugin that hides the sidebar, because I love hearing support requests.
There is also a big difference between ignoring people and taking on board what they're saying but disagreeing. I hear your objections to the sidebar. I disagree, I have also explained why I disagree. It doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the fact you don't like the sidebar, but the thing is, we're not trying to build your perfect software. We're trying to build OUR perfect software, and that doesn't mean catering to your exact requests.
In SMF's case, they weren't particularly interested in what we had to say, despite being more than just community members. Nao worked on the single most popular SMF mod, plus contributed hundreds of bug reports. I wrote their bug tracker, spent months reviewing community mod submissions and did literally thousands of support topics, and both of us were almost on the SMF development team in one way or another. I'd say that would tend to qualify us for having some say in how things are run, yes?
(Also note that 2.1 is only just into alpha, with far less changes than we've made, and a new development team since 2.0 final was released. And even then, the 2.0 / 2.1 dev team has forked off into their own software. Because the team fundamentally is toxic, it continually pushes out the people who have the drive to actually do anything.)
Except you should understand (being a programmer), as I've alluded to, that it just isn't that simple.
So you hide the sidebar. You now have to process that decision on every page, in a way that you don't currently. We also need to rewrite everywhere that pushes content into the sidebar, to now not push it into the sidebar, which means we have to find somewhere else to put it. Which in half the cases is also going to mean writing new templates for them to now be horizontally arranged rather than vertically stacked, or just simply not performing the queries for it in the first place.
This also means that the plugins that already exist which use the sidebar (several come to mind) will all need to be heavily modified to do all the same logic, turning one into two or even three states (on/sidebar, on/elsewhere, off). All because you want an option to turn something off.
That's what I mean about consequences - to you, it's one line of HTML, to us it's at least a day's work, and frankly, I've got far more important things to be doing for Wedge's benefit like finishing the things that I've started.
Not in the core. It's not impossible to do, though. But we find it makes the central content far too narrow, which is why we don't do it.
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Let me say this... I just scrunched my browser in, and the sidebar dropped to the bottom -- that looks perfect. Is there a way to make it do that on default (as opposed to hiding it)?
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I don't trust they have their shit together -- especially after you told me they are still on PHP 4.
Managing developer egos is difficult. I've been to hell and back with that, so I understand.
As far as mobile posting on SMF, you could do a lot worse than smf-media.com's offering.
As far as blogs go, notice that it's not exactly prominent here and amounts to nothing more than a custom theme, and can't be made anything like what you're after without a serious rewrite, so much so that I've thought about dropping core blog support because it's too limited for most uses.That's great. And I can't understand side consequences for that. I don't have sidebars on our forum, and I read them just fine on my 17" and 24". Maybe I'm missing something.
Let me put it this way, I have a 17" laptop, with 1920x1200 resolution, and most forums being that wide (at, say, 95% width) just become hard to read. So many forums I know actually have a fixed width to prevent that being an issue anyway. But even though I have a large resolution, I invariably run my browser window at around 1000px wide because that's how the web seems to work best, not to mention the fact that it keeps the reading width about right.Again, I'm missing something. Why have I not heard a single complaint on our forum?
I guess I'm thinking of it from a Drupal mindest -- and I'm not familiar with the architecture you're working with, so I concede that.
Let me say this... I just scrunched my browser in, and the sidebar dropped to the bottom -- that looks perfect. Is there a way to make it do that on default (as opposed to hiding it)?
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That isn't what I said. I said that had compatibility code in there from back in the PHP 4 days. The fact it supports older versions of PHP isn't inherently a bad thing, just as it's not a bad idea that software works on Windows XP when 7 and 8 are the current versions.
It's the case. Trust me, if there were issues with SMF security, it would have been fixed in Wedge by now and very likely someone would have told them about it.
Except that was the complete opposite of what I meant, and in fact of what I said. The problem isn't developer ego. It's everyone else who believes that their say is as important as the developers' say except they're not the ones doing the work.
As far as mobile posting on SMF, you could do a lot worse than smf-media.com's offering.
As far as blogs go, notice that it's not exactly prominent here and amounts to nothing more than a custom theme, and can't be made anything like what you're after without a serious rewrite, so much so that I've thought about dropping core blog support because it's too limited for most uses.
And are they full width or fixed width?
Let me put it this way, I have a 17" laptop, with 1920x1200 resolution, and most forums being that wide (at, say, 95% width) just become hard to read. So many forums I know actually have a fixed width to prevent that being an issue anyway. But even though I have a large resolution, I invariably run my browser window at around 1000px wide because that's how the web seems to work best, not to mention the fact that it keeps the reading width about right.
Because you're dealing with a very specific subset of the forum population. I however have had the interesting experience of providing support on sm.org, which doesn't have the sidebar out of the box and between there and here, I know which is more popular. You might not have had a complaint but I guarantee that if we make it an option, it's going to provide a plentiful source of support issues for us to deal with.
And therein lies the other difference: Drupal is incredibly modularised. Ordinarily I wouldn't complain about that, but what that means is each module does its own work in terms of databases, as opposed to a flatter structure that gets all the data it needs for the current page or thereabouts. The result is something much more efficient for its own use (I've seen Drupal installations demanding quite literally hundreds of queries from the database to render a single page) but less directly configurable. But in any case, Drupal should not be a benchmark to measure against, except to measure how much faster you are. The ideals of pluggability are wonderful but the practicalities just don't stack up.
I thought we'd already explained it did this before? Anyway, not without a code change and not a nice one. See if Uncle Nao is prepared to expend more bytes per page, every page.
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Obama may be in his 3rd term
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Not without another amendment to the constitution.
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Obama may be in his 3rd term
http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-joint-resolution/15
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We'll agree to disagree that forcing a sidebar is not the answer to that.
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We'll agree to disagree that forcing a sidebar is not the answer to that.
I'm sort of coming around to the functionality of the sidebar...
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I already alluded to this fact when I said there were multiple ways it could be done - except they all result in the same side effect of queries being run that should not be, and content being set up but not being displayed.
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I already alluded to this fact when I said there were multiple ways it could be done - except they all result in the same side effect of queries being run that should not be, and content being set up but not being displayed.
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Short of actually implementing the option you wanted, there is no way to refactor it to avoid those things.
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Short of actually implementing the option you wanted, there is no way to refactor it to avoid those things.
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At the risk of repeating myself... anything a plugin can do will just be to hide it. To actually prevent all the other stuff happening would be to either make an option for it, or have everything detect whether the sidebar is present.
Either case requires more effort computationally than is currently in use, so hiding a plugin, while entirely possible, is not a smart idea because it will force more work to be done than it should be.
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At the risk of repeating myself... anything a plugin can do will just be to hide it. To actually prevent all the other stuff happening would be to either make an option for it, or have everything detect whether the sidebar is present.
Either case requires more effort computationally than is currently in use, so hiding a plugin, while entirely possible, is not a smart idea because it will force more work to be done than it should be.