Wedge

Anyway. I have more alcohol to drink right now, a hangover for the morning, followed by a 200 mile road trip, just so I can go to a family funeral tomorrow

But since it's become increasingly clear that I'm barking up another wrong tree, I might as well revert what I've done and go with my first plan of enhancing what's there and praying to $deity that my fears are baseless, except I know full well I'm right there.

(See, Unknown's someone I look up to and when he says in not so many words that he thinks I'm working off broken logic, I tend to agree with him. Then I remember that he's younger than me and still managed to achieve so much more than I have so far, and I quietly begin to question myself. I hear my beer calling.)

And that's because they still depend on version checking. My proposed method explicitly does NOT check for Wedge version.

It probably does, I haven't spent any time in their ecosystems. But given the mods submitted, the relative skill level of the coders and so on, the majority are certainly not contributed by veteran coders.

1. If your community is producing bug fix packages, we have to ask the question why aren't being made part of the core product?

I cannot see any justification for *not* patching it.

2. It discourages people from upgrading. To me, an upgrade shouldn't just be about fixing problems, it should be an overall iteration on what was there before, so improvements (not necessarily new features, but improving existing ones) as well as fixing bugs.

Most of the mod authors are not strong programmers, and invariably look for the easiest route to implement something, which means template edits in the first line of attack, source edits in the second, and almost never taking advantage of the resources actually in SMF to pull some of it off.

Warning: This package modifies core functionality of Wedge, and may need to be uninstalled prior to an upgrade.

When you upgrade, the package manager will automatically uninstall this package for you if it conflicts, and it may need to be reinstalled or even rewritten at that time.

* File permissions, and making files writable to PHP, is one of the single most asked questions on the support boards -> can we make mods that don't need to make the core files writable?

* Mods only working on certain versions, people asking whether mods will be updated -> does a mod expressly have to ask for a version, or can it attempt to determine if all the features it needs are available?

* Mods searching for code and not finding it, because the original code has been modified (either by a later version, wherein even the comments get modified sometimes, or by another mod) -> can we make mods that either don't need to modify the files, or can better manage to sort themselves out without having to trip over each other?

* Mods that need to modify templates -> why do they need to modify templates? Does it always have to be a template edit, or is it about the data the templates output? Can content be injected into a template in some other fashion?

making an installer script, but the more we talked about it, the more I felt comfortable abandoning file edits in the base.

It does come up regularly enough. I'm not sure what you couldn't do with strategic insertion of hooks, it doesn't need to be insane.

It's not that hard to figure out. But premium sites can't use it because by definition everything in a package server has to be accessible by a simple GET and as far as I can tell, without any authentication handling.

The thing most people seem to forget is that the bulk of mod authors aren't people just writing stuff to give away - they tend to write it for themselves and their site, then share.

Or better IMO, make the editor buttons configurable to the admin, so if they want to add them, they can. But yes, this could be achieved with hooks (even in SMF) and I don't think it is.

Well, I'd personally debate that it should be a core feature rather than a mod.

But I've seen even large-scale phpBB mods done, well, as lists of file editing, which says to me either there aren't hooks, or they're not really in use much.

That all said, I'm willing to bet that part of the problem is simply that most mods are contributed by people in their spare time, without any interest or desire in writing big and complex mods

I agree, to a point. The thing is, apart from the fact that it doesn't seem to have hurt MyBB or WordPress (and especially WordPress)

I'm not convinced it will restrict to large or tiny mods.

That's really what we have to do: just expanding hooks on its own won't be enough. We have to make everything else be more open to extension too, and upon doing that, almost anything should be possible.

We aren't focusing on Stylings. I just offer them as an easy alternative for non modders who want to have different themes for their users without making it a hassle to maintain.

In absence of anything else, the package manager means mod authors have to do direct edits to achieve things, rather than making use of facilities available. The main consequence of this is mods doing template edits which cause support issues because they then don't appear on some custom themes, or at least not the way they were intended. Adding to that, any theme that does do anything creative invariably fails, which is why so many themes are basically Curve knock-offs as opposed to anything more daring. (Yes, there were designers who do more daring things, but the vast bulk of the time the theme is just recoloured.)

And while there are some huge mods out there (Nao and Dragooon's Aeva Media, SimpleDesk by me and a couple of others, plus the portal mods)

they're still generally not that different, because he knows the reality of how many mods don't work on custom themes, and the support boards are full of it.

The lack of premium ecosystem for SMF also tells me there's a problem.

As for mods, the situation there is marginally healthier, indicating that people generally would rather have new features than themes (at least, there is more effort put into mods than there is in themes, in general)

For example, just glance through the last submitted mods to the mod site:
* adding a user's birthday to their profile summary (in addition to the date which is there)
* specifying an alternative email address for outgoing mail, so that the admin's email isn't used for notifications
* a bugfix for the IE8 jumping text box problem, because obviously that couldn't have been added to 1.1.14/1.1.15 or similar
* two different mods for adding the Google +1 button, one for per-topic, one for per-post
* a nice FAQ mod
* a mod to replace the stats area at the bottom of the board index with a jQuery-based tab solution (which means adding jQuery, and will fail on any other theme/mod that already added jQuery)
* a mod to add several symbols as editor buttons (like 1/2, 1/4)
* putting the page number in the title of the page

Over the three months I was on the Cust team, reviewing mods, the vast bulk of what came in were certainly in the 'small tweaks' category.

That means if a particular mod and a particular theme don't play nicely, it's not related to the systemic issues currently in SMF and its environment, but it's that the theme does something the mod didn't expect, or vice versa - but it means that it can be dealt with on an individual basis. (Even WP has issues in this direction, I would note)

FWIW, Notepad++ offers 1, 2, some of 3 (there's a popup display for the selection of tabs, much like Alt-Tab does but no jump-to-specific-tab-by-number), 4, 5 if you want, not sure about 6, 7 - well, it doesn't fail on 60MB SQL dumps but it doesn't like it much, 9, 11 and 12.

It has 8 too (clone view in tab context menu).

It's not the uber-IDE but I've found it to be a very nice and capable tool, I certainly haven't found it wanting - except possibly for lack of an SVN plugin that doesn't require the SVN command line tools.

And what do you think of our work from what you've seen so far? :unsure:

I'm looking for a new PHP IDE for windows, preferably native(Java ones don't work as beautifully), I've been using phpDesigner but am thinking of moving on. What would you guys suggest?

I can't live without function assist :o.

"Super Text Search" for multi-file searches.

But then you can't really prevent an iframe fooling people, now can you? It's all up to people to properly look out for that. Session tokens might restrict them to the point where blind images won't screw but if a person does get the entire site in his iframe, he has almost endless control.

What is clickjacking? When someone makes an image leading to a private url?

Also, doesn't httponly contain a few security problems of its own? Even cPanel recommends cookie instead of httponly.

And SSL mostly protects against traffic sniffing correct? I'm mostly trying to figure out what is the significance of each security measure out there.