Wedge

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.

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One year and a half... In a couple of weeks, it will be one year and a half since Pete and I decided to work on our own SMF fork. Talk about commitment!

About a year later, thanks to the SMF license change, over half a dozen new forks went into production. Somehow, I felt a bit relieved that we weren't going to be 'the new SMF' and that maybe we could simply focus on being the smarter one, instead of the one everyone wants to use (including morons. We hate morons. But don't tell them, or they'll come.)
Some of them were officially stopped after a few days or weeks. Others lasted a bit longer, but are clearly never going to happen. Nightwish's fork is clearly, and definitely, the only 'serious' competition we ever had, and given that I was the one that revealed its existence, I feel somehow responsible for pushing him into working hard on it. After several months of daily commits, however, it went off the radar and it would seem that none of the other forks made it into 2012.

Well, I'm sad about it. Once again, everyone's looking at Wedge again and expecting a release. I was kind of enjoying being able to simply work on it without any pressure. Hmm, still no pressure, but I'm starting to feel uncomfortable that nearly a year after SMF 2 went gold, no single fork has been made available to the public. So, it's time for me to look into what's ready and what's not.

If you'll remember, back when I published the first screenshots, I said I'd start using Wedge on Wedge.org itself once we'd reach 200 Likes on Facebook. While it was more of a joke than anything, it just so happens that we're getting close to that decent number of friends, and that in the same time, I'm working hard on making the transition as smooth as possible. So it's very likely that Wedge.org will actually be running Wedge by the time we reach 200 Likes. I'm currently running a 'beta-test' of the Wedge.org website on our friends group. The feedback is very positive, thankfully, so it appears I won't have too much to implement or fix before I make the final switch.

What else? Well, it's become customary to give a quick review of what we did since the last blog post... Pete worked on removing the calendar to turn it into a plugin, but as it turned out, it was harder than expected, and it pretty much hurt his motivation, and he has yet to dive back into the game. Still, 11 commits is better than all of the other forks together, so I guess I can still hope. I really don't want to keep working on Wedge alone, that's enough to drive a man crazy. Plus, well, I love working with Pete. He's such a great guy. I could say the same of the rest of our non-dev team. It's always been such a pleasure to share ideas with you!

And now for the customary changelog summary...

As for myself, I made 125 commits, which is pretty much on par with my regular output. I'm not going to keep up with this in 2012, well I'm hoping I'll take some time off because I never stopped to take a moment, and maybe I should go see a doctor or something. Or at least get paid for working on Wedge. I spent most of November working on improving the template skeleton system (it's now pretty much flawless), and finishing the thought system. In December I rewrote the BBCode implementation to be smarter about fixing mismatched tags and even giving proper error messages to the user.

Details This skin is a work in progress! And the select box looks even better in action! I like exclamation marks, sue me!

This skin is a work in progress! And the select box looks even better in action! I like exclamation marks, sue me!

Then the big chunk -- I had in mind that I wanted to replace our basic select boxes with a JavaScript implementation that would look cool. Well, it took me weeks to get it right, but it's possibly the best JS select box every written when it comes to usability, features and compacity (it's only about 2 kilobytes when other JS plugins are usually double the size.) Learned a LOT about JS code size optimization in the process, which means Wedge loads faster. I also changed my mind on that cool feature of mine, the automatic quote splitter. While technically interesting and everything, I felt that in the long run, it might seem unnatural to those used to non-Wysiwyg editors. So I decided to only run the splitter if you hold the Shift or Ctrl keys when pressing Enter. Plus I've documented it in the post editor.

Which brings us to January, where I kept working on the improved select box. I most notably added a custom scrollbar. After I was done, needless to say I was pretty burnt out, so I decided to focus on a small and easy task instead -- getting rid of the Wysiwyg editor's iframe. Well, that's what I thought... It turned into an absolute nightmare. Oddly, the only browser that liked doing without the iframe was Internet Explorer. Of all browsers. Including IE6. Well. Eventually, I had to admit defeat and went back to the original code. Which, I hate to say, was just as broken. I just don't use Wysiwyg that much, you know. So I spent another couple of weeks working on fixing it. It was pretty much an extensive rewrite, and I can now safely say that our Wysiwyg editor is more solid than SMF's. And shorter. And smarter. As I pointed out in the changelog (you know where to find it), the most annoying bug was due to Wedge using sprited images (inside a div) instead of regular img tags to show buttons and smileys. It turned out that IE loses focus when you click a div outside the iframe, but it doesn't when you click an img. Don't shoot the messenger. No, fear not, I didn't come back to a series of image files, it would be ridiculous. I simply added a dummy transparent image in front of the buttons if using IE. Sometimes, the simple solution is what is best.

After I was done with "small tasks that end up taking weeks to complete", I went the safe route and implemented some additions I'd already written for Noisen.com and Wedge.org -- such as indicating the number of new posts next to a New icon. Or adding support for transparent avatars. (Well, this one's from Aeva Media 2.x, technically.) Then I fixed a few broken areas of WeCSS (which live627 declared his love for, oh I sooo needed that!), and I renamed the 'sticky' feature to 'pinned', which took longer than I'd hoped, but will definitely be an improvement for everyone -- pinning a topic makes more sense than 'setting it sticky'. What does that mean anyway?

Now, what's in store for February? Well, as I said at the beginning, my plans are to finally use Wedge on Wedge.org once and for all, as soon as possible, and that does mean this month. So I've quickly cooked up a new skin for Wedge, which I'll hopefully be using here. My current keyword for Wedge is 'simplicity', so I'm trying to remove as much crap from the templates as possible. The current feedback is very positive, so I think I'm on the right track here.

And if I happen to fall asleep and not post for another month -- go, go, The Artist! The French touch is alive and kicking!

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OK, so what's been going on lately? Nao's been busy with a variety of tweaks and gouges to the source, but I've been busy working away on plugins.

(Yes, careful readers will note that we used to call them add-ons, but they're officially called plugins now after the big conversation we invited everyone into. It's a small detail but an important one and since it affects usability, we wanted to make sure you were all involved.)

Why am I writing about it now? Apart from the fact it's been weeks since our last blog post, I really wanted to pimp out the fact that plugins now exist for it - you see, last month when I talked about it, it was still just fresh off the design board, had a few rough edges but worked. Now, some of those rough edges have been smoothed out - you can, for example, actually delete plugins now once they're disabled.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the plugins themselves, and I've attached a screenshot from the plugin manager as it is on my PC right now.

First up, you might be wondering why WedgeDesk is broken, when it would be a plugin I'd be more inclined to keep updated. Well, it's only because I very recently changed the hook mechanics in the display page, phasing out the old display_buttons hook and I haven't yet updated WD for the new hook, but that's something I'll do soon enough. (It's also, incidentally, how I realised it wasn't possible to delete a plugin that couldn't be enabled for whatever reason)

All of the other plugins were discussed in http://wedge.org/pub/6929/personal-plugin-showcase-yes-i-m-an-attention-grabbing-git/ - a somewhat aptly named thread, if I may say so myself. ;) If you're curious about any of the plugins I would encourage you to go read that thread, as it has pictures and more details about them.

It's actually listing them alphabetically, though I think I need to change that to include natural case sorting (r in reCAPTCHA comes after Z in the ASCII table, and it probably should discount the case) and I suspect the interface may need some changes going forward to cope with lots of plugins at once - but that's why I'm opening the floor now, so that if you have any thoughts about that, that there's a venue to share them now that you can actually see what having multiple plugins at once would look like.

Oh, and I suppose to validate that it's not some kind of random hyperbole - these are real plugins that can be used :)

It's been a fun period these last few days, kicking out small plugins - I've spent maybe an hour and a half per plugin, and in that time I've been able to establish that the hooks are present for the plugins to work with, and if they weren't present, to make them available; until I wrote the reCAPTCHA plugin, the hooks to extend the verification system didn't exist, for example.

It's also interesting in other ways, I get to test other systems in Wedge, and find ways to enhance them; one of the screenshots I've posted for 'Flitter' in the above-mentioned thread shows a 'Your settings have been saved' message - this is an enhancement I only added recently as I couldn't be sure whether saving had been done without going into the DB. It's a usability enhancement, and it doesn't require plugins having to manually support it; it's covered totally automatically for standard settings pages :) And I managed to find a small bug in the admin pages because of doing plugins, there's really no better way to test how things work than by trying to break them!

My plugins repo is not publicly available (though a few people do have access to it) and I certainly wouldn't call these release-quality, in almost every case it's to prove the system is up to the job, rather than to make sure there's plugins for everyone when we get round to doing some kind of launch (and I can't see my releasing the plugins before Wedge 1.0 gold anyway)

Sadly, I'm going to have to leave it here for now, it's late, I have a few things to do before bed, and even more sadly I couldn't find a good musical reference to leave in this post :( But as the philosopher Jagger once said, you can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might just find you get what you need.
But there you are, that's where I am right now :)

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A year ago, on August 25, 2010, the first commit to the Wedge SVN server was made. I was hoping to get to rev 1000 before the first anniversary, but I tend to commit small bug fixes in a large batch so we 'only' reached the 965 commit milestone.

Well, a year later, what can be said of the project...? It already had a name back then, it still has the same. It had goals and a vision, it still does. Some adjustments were made to our schedule (personally, I decided to give up on a lot of the Noisen.com improvements I was planning to integrate, and will rewrite them later), and other things were pushed into the codebase as we went -- the product of being mainly fueled by passion, instead of money. I know, I know, it's a classic, but it's just the plain truth -- you can't work full time on an unpaid project for a year without some kind of solid passion and commitment. Back when we started the project, I wasn't 100% sure Pete would remain interested in the project in the long run. I was totally wrong, so I'd like to take the opportunity to give a big thumb up to him for being one of the driving forces (the other being me, but I may not say :P) behind the Wedge project, a shining beacon of courage and determination, a herdsman for the nerds, a vanquisher of spaghetti code and... What, I fully expect him to give me the same treatment in return! :niark:

(Oh, and in other news, apparently I'm back in the 'Friends' group at SM.org. Can anyone tell me when this kind of thing happens? :P)

What better way to celebrate the first anniversary than to release a public alpha version! Yes!

Okay, I'm playing with your nerves... There is nothing (yet), but it won't be too long now. As the commit process is now a public one, you've all seen we're still as busy as ever to fix bugs and add new features. I can't honestly see myself release Wedge without having first integrated Aeva into the avatar and attachment system, and I can't work on that before I can fully focus on it. And this month has been doing a very good work at distracting me: Nightwish's fork (interesting ideas, it's definitely going to be the worthiest competitor to Wedge if Nightwish can keep up for another year :D), playing a little gem of a game played Xenoblade (okay, so I passed on other RPGs and JRPGs these last few months because they're time eaters, but the guy made one of my all-time top 3 games so I have to play his titles, even if unrelated to Xenogears), and more generally a personal burnout and declining health (I'm not one to complain, though. These things happen in cycles.)

In short: I don't remember my original schedule, but right now my personal target is for a demo in early September, and an alpha in late September or October. I'm still kind of wary about releasing my code to a general audience. It's our baby you know... We want Harvard for it. Hopefully it'll spawn into Facebook. Or something else.

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