Aftermath of the Great Deployment

Arantor

  • As powerful as possible, as complex as necessary.
  • Posts: 14,278
Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« on March 21st, 2012, 04:45 PM »
So, yeah, we're about 5 days in after finally moving wedge.org to actually running Wedge, and I'd like to take a bit of time to just go over how I (at least) see it.

First of all, thank you to everyone who's stopped by, especially if you've stopped by and really loved what Nao's done with the default theme. I had the joy of seeing it ahead of time, so the surprise wasn't quite as big on me, but it was really great seeing it, especially being able to watch it grow.[1]

Also, a big thanks to everyone that's put up with the bugs we've had. As you can probably imagine, Wedge is still a living breathing work, it's still growing, still changing, as you can see from the New Revs thread every time we commit.

Because of that, and because we'd never deployed it in a public way beforehand, there was a lot of stuff that had never been thoroughly tested. So it was a matter of a little disappointment for us that things were buggy - and the list has seemed to be pretty huge in some respects - but overall, I think it's turned out pretty well. The bulk of the bugs are more annoying than serious, and I don't believe any of them are privacy or security related, either, so that's something to be quite happy about, really.

The funny thing is that there's a lot of things that I doubt people have really noticed yet. The theme's the most obvious change, and the way there are icons and animations and things, but I would encourage people to dig a little deeper. There are all sorts of less obvious changes afoot. You might just be surprised at what you find ;)

As ever, if there's anything you like or don't like, tell us! We can't fix things if we don't know they're broken, and if there's a better way of doing something than we're currently doing, tell us that too - the end of it, we want to turn out something truly awesome, and while Wedge is a long way down that road, there's still plenty more to do yet.

Sadly, we have not yet turned the corner that marks the end of 'new features' which would otherwise put us on the road to public releases. Things are still a bit too raw for that, still too many things not yet polished, or finished or tested to destruction. But we've certainly passed the biggest milestone: we've finally moved our own site to our own platform. With that, the single greatest hurdle has been passed; we get to test things in a real environment, we got to thoroughly test the importer, and we get to properly share with you what we've been doing all this time.

So, really, thank you all for bearing with us while we got here, and while we deal with the immediate things we've seen from it - and you'll be able to see the rough edges get polished, things get tweaked, things get added or removed. It's been a long road thus far, and it's not nearly over yet - but you're certainly welcome to join us for the ride :)
 1. The only sad part for me was that we'd decided to keep it under wraps so even when there were screenshots of stuff I was working on, they were all using the existing 'Wine' skin, which you can use here if you want, just head to Profile > Skin Selector.
When we unite against a common enemy that attacks our ethos, it nurtures group solidarity. Trolls are sensational, yes, but we keep everyone honest. | Game Memorial

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #1, on March 21st, 2012, 10:53 PM »
Well, the only thing I really, really want to finish implementing before we go alpha is proper privacy, which means doing custom membergroups and trying to find the ideal performance solution for table joining or set searching.

BTW, guests can also test Wine by following this link:
http://wedge.org/do/skin/?theme=1_c2tpbnMvV2luZQ;e0031ae=a9525cb84724c351121de8b54708b36a

:)

PS: I enabled max_urlLength and also the setting that adds invisible spaces inside long words... Should prevent layout from breaking in the future.

:edit: Hmm... /new/#new takes me to the original post, even after sending this.....

:edit: Even stranger: editing this post shows me the original URL surrounded by url tags, instead of the shortened URL...

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #2, on March 21st, 2012, 11:02 PM »
Quote
Even stranger: editing this post shows me the original URL surrounded by url tags, instead of the shortened URL...
That's the bug we've been seeing, where things get wrapped in url tags when they shouldn't.

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #3, on March 21st, 2012, 11:38 PM »
It's not that... Wedge generates a URL like [url=real_url]shortened_url[/url]... It should be showing that exact same structure, because at that point, the shortened url is just like any proper 'string' between url tags (i.e. not a URL per se.)
Posted: March 21st, 2012, 11:33 PM

Also, I'm really, really getting sent to the previous post whenever I send a new one... If I reload, then I get to the last post.
IIRC you made the "first post is sticky" blog hack, and I don't think you've been using the same technique as I did..?
Do you remember what you did?

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #4, on March 21st, 2012, 11:42 PM »
Quote
It's not that... Wedge generates a URL like shortened_url... It should be showing that exact same structure, because at that point, the shortened url is just like any proper 'string' between url tags (i.e. not a URL per se.)
That's the thing, it shouldn't even be doing that, the bare URL is supposed to remain a bare URL unless the author explicitly put it inside url tags, cf. the Dr Who thread in the private board where Aaron quoted a link of mine.
Quote
IIRC you made the "first post is sticky" blog hack, and I don't think you've been using the same technique as I did..?
Do you remember what you did?
No, I messed around big-time with the way pagination was set up, but I think that's related to how 'new' is calculated. I'll add it to the to-investigate pile.

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #5, on March 22nd, 2012, 12:09 AM »
Have you seen the 'shortened url' link in your quote...? It's SCARY. It's supposed to go through nobbc...!!

As for pagination: yeah, I think it's in 'new' as well, specifically the code that transforms the new into a start_from.

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #6, on March 22nd, 2012, 12:16 PM »
I will take a look at it but right now (given 'T minus 2 days') I don't really feel I can give it my full attention, if that makes sense.

Also, I'm slightly surprised no-one's said anything about the page-index navigation having 'prev/next' arrows by the pages. I actually thought that was more of a usability improvement than a lot of things we did >_>

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #7, on March 22nd, 2012, 12:36 PM »
Quote from Arantor on March 21st, 2012, 04:45 PM
So, really, thank you all for bearing with us while we got here, and while we deal with the immediate things we've seen from it - and you'll be able to see the rough edges get polished, things get tweaked, things get added or removed. It's been a long road thus far, and it's not nearly over yet - but you're certainly welcome to join us for the ride :)
You are thanking us? I personally have to thank you guys for all the work and the patience. I am and will remain a noob with these kind of stuff you guys are doing. But I am a noob who appreciates the commitments and the sacrifices of others. Thank you guys. Keep wedging into the future.

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #8, on March 22nd, 2012, 03:09 PM »
Quote from Arantor on March 22nd, 2012, 12:16 PM
Also, I'm slightly surprised no-one's said anything about the page-index navigation having 'prev/next' arrows by the pages. I actually thought that was more of a usability improvement than a lot of things we did >_>
Definitely!

Oh, and I didn't notice that enablePreviousNext was disabled here... Re-enabled it. I'm sure someone will suddenly notice how cool that rewritten feature is :)

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #9, on March 22nd, 2012, 03:22 PM »
Quote from Nao on March 22nd, 2012, 03:09 PM
Quote from Arantor on March 22nd, 2012, 12:16 PM
Also, I'm slightly surprised no-one's said anything about the page-index navigation having 'prev/next' arrows by the pages. I actually thought that was more of a usability improvement than a lot of things we did >_>
Definitely!

Oh, and I didn't notice that enablePreviousNext was disabled here... Re-enabled it. I'm sure someone will suddenly notice how cool that rewritten feature is :)
I noticed the prev/next the other day?? - really frikkin useful on an iPad, I can tell you!

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #10, on March 22nd, 2012, 03:39 PM »
Was in the demo, but here...? I'm not sure.
Heck, it's enabled by default in Wedge (from install.sql), I have no idea why it was disabled... Perhaps I disabled it in the SMF-based Wedge.org...?
Posted: March 22nd, 2012, 03:35 PM

BTW, the links are hidden when there's not enough width on your device to accomodate for three titles at the same time.
Since I have an Opera sidebar (list of tabs) that takes a lot of space, I never see the list. Maybe I should rework that, because it's really a bit too strict.

Oh, and the setting really wasn't set in the admin area... So it's not related to that.

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #11, on March 22nd, 2012, 03:53 PM »
Quote
Was in the demo, but here...? I'm not sure.
I was referring to the Pages: << prev [1] 2 >> bit ;)
Quote
Perhaps I disabled it in the SMF-based Wedge.org...?
Quite possibly.

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #12, on March 22nd, 2012, 04:07 PM »
Yes, I know what you were referring to, but come to think of it, that post from billy2 about the iPad was probably in reply to you, not me ;)
(Heck, yeah it's definitely so much more usable on a touch screen..!)

I'm sure I disabled it on the SMF version because, well, it sucked :P

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #13, on March 22nd, 2012, 04:23 PM »
Quote
(Heck, yeah it's definitely so much more usable on a touch screen..!)
That's one of the single biggest reasons I implemented it, precisely because it is a pain to navigate even on an iPad, let alone an iPod/iPhone, across pages without it.
Quote
I'm sure I disabled it on the SMF version because, well, it sucked :P
Oh, and yes, prev/next topic sucked very badly. Not only was it unhelpful, I know users were confused by it because they thought it meant prev/next page.

Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #14, on March 22nd, 2012, 04:44 PM »
Yes. We were so happy when we finished implementing that one :)

I love it that Wedge is so full of goodies that people won't immediately notice, but make it superior to any other software package when it comes to attention to detail.

(Of course, the price to pay is the infamous development delays...)

Oh, BTW, r1501 does seem to fix anchor positioning on blogs!
Re: Aftermath of the Great Deployment
« Reply #15, on March 22nd, 2012, 06:03 PM »
Woot. Bug: Reply #-1 on blog posts. Easy to fix but funny one ;)
Posted: March 22nd, 2012, 05:16 PM

Test. Don't mind me.
Posted: March 22nd, 2012, 05:41 PM

Another test.