Wedge

Antechinus said something interesting - and useful.All it needs is the CSS3 resize property set to 'vertical'.I took a few minutes out and stretched my brain, was quite nice.I don't write GM nearly enough.

This is a very tough question to answer. Certainly there are a lot of features in Wedge that many will not use - not every forum owner wants to have a blog system built in, for example. Nor the calendar, nor <insert feature here>

But big features like that - like blogging support, like the gallery, like the calendar - these are features we have in the core so that we can maintain them. All too often mods get neglected over time - having them in the core means they don't get forgotten about.

The calendar is a particularly odd example: many SMF users didn't want the calendar in the core, it being a feature they didn't use. But there is another group of people who would actually go elsewhere if the calendar were removed/left to be neglected. These people love having it available and want it to be more powerful than it was.

So the approach we've gone for is that we've added these features in, but in a way that we hope doesn't make it feel too big or scary - and kept the performance aspect too.


Interesting parallel, really, is Microsoft Word. Word adds new features every release, and while some consider it bloaty, the bottom line is that any user might only use 10% of its features - but if each user uses a different 10%, it caters to a lot more people as a result - and this is something we've tried to keep in mind.

We're not going to add every little thing we've thought of - and there are plenty of things we've rejected from being in the core for just that reason. But the goal we have is to make it easier to make them as add-ons that 'just work' and require little maintenance over time.

What will likely happen is that once the core is stable and the ability to expand it through add-ons is mature enough, I'll start turning some of the 'would be nice to have, but not in core' things into add-ons, but we'll see how that turns out - it really requires the core to be mature enough to achieve that first.

How about we list personal messages in the Core Features page?

I'm just thinking I've come across cases where the admin didn't want it to be available at all, and while it can be disabled for users through permissions, the tab is still visible to admins.

I've been looking at PHP 5.3 today, never really touched it before since prior to what I'm doing this moment, everything had to be reasonably compatible, which meant being less bleeding edge, but what I'm working on tonight is something I'm running myself so I thought I'd look at PHP 5.3.

Overall, vs 5.2 there's little there I think I'd use but it's nice to see some of what they're adding. What did catch my eye however, was this: http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.goto.php

The picture at the bottom for one, but more relevantly, why the hell did PHP's devs think adding goto was a GOOD idea?! Seriously... I haven't yet found a situation in PHP where a goto would be the truly best answer.

I foresee this causing lots of bad mojo with PHP which it was doing so well at shaking off.

We've been asked this more than once, so I thought it was about time I answered it.

The short answer is no: SMF mods and themes will not work properly on Wedge without significant overhaul, and this is completely intentional.

It's not about being petty and intentionally breaking it just to annoy people, there are major factors that we sat down - both of us being experienced mod writers - and decided we wanted to tackle.


SMF mods explicitly rely on the code, a mod package is really just a set of find/replace instructions on the code. The only way to retain a reasonable level of compatibility with SMF mods is to not change the code. It isn't ideal, of course, but it is the only way to go about that in the SMF world.

This causes multiple problems, file permissions giving everyone grief, as well as more and more mods being installed causes them to collide further and further until the point where mods just refuse to install because the code they look for has already been installed.

Add to that, that mods on custom themes are at best variable in terms of success and you find yourself in a world of hassle after a while, even when you're using mods written by people who know the code well enough to avoid most of the trouble.


The consequence is a serious amount of rearchitecting the core of SMF in Wedge, to make it far less dependent on mods having to edit the code itself. The downside is that in the short term, users may find a restricted choice of features available to them, while modders learn how to leverage the power of modding in Wedge without code editing.

As for themes, the amount of change is smaller, but still we've made a large number of changes to the default theme, meaning that any theme will need reworking for Wedge as well, but the compatibility should be greater in the long term.


tl:dr; No, themes and mods won't work. But for the hassle of modders and themers learning how to work on Wedge, everyone wins because you'll be able to drop things in with less hassle (if they're written properly), and both the modders and themers should find there is a lower support requirement because the base is that much more flexible.
Also, we will document the main changes we made, so that modders can easily adapt to them.

http://xkcd.com/810/

There is nothing more to add to this comic, IMO.

For those who know me, I have a thing about retro gaming, about emulation.

This sums it up pretty nicely.


8BITS