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Messages - Arantor
1486
Off-topic / Re: System visitations: vB 3.8.7
« on February 23rd, 2013, 06:32 PM »
Ah where were we?
First, logging back in. Why, oh why, oh why, is there this insane 'Thank you for logging in. We will redirect you in a moment.' screen?
I don't have any posts or threads that are currently moderated, so I can't take a look at them yet :/
OK, attachments. This is curious. You can set the allowed extensions, maximum size per extension, thumbnail size per extension and stuff like that. What's most curious is that .jpeg files are allowed to be only 20000 bytes while .jpg files are capped at 100000, and .jpeg has a max size of 620x280 as opposed to no upper limit of image dimensions. More interestingly you can set HTTP headers to be sent with such files. Quite why you'd need to is a little beyond me right now, but the fact the option is provided is certainly curious. Wait... you can even set these limits per filetype per user, meaning you can limit max file and image sizes per type per user, e.g. one group is limited to 20K, 620x280 BMP files, while another could be 1MB, 4096x3072 for the same if you wanted.
You can also search attachments, by size, popularity, oldest/newest, plus getting rid of old attachments, as well as searching by name/who attached/attached before or after a given date, by more/less than a given number of downloads, by size, visibility and stuff like that. It's very thorough.
Then I get to add new user... holy shit there is a lot of options. I mean seriously... holy hell there is a lot here. From the one screen, you can set near enough everything that's in the user profile (user, password, email, language, user title, website, birthday, signature, ICQ/AIM/Y!M/MSN/Skype, whether a COPPA user or not, referrer, IP address, post count, avatar, profile picture, signature picture, other custom profile fields, all the primary/secondary groups, reputation, warnings, and pretty much all the user preferences that are on offer. It's truly enormous.
There's also some other interesting features - a built in referrals system, which you can get nice reports from. That's something that seems lacking in SMF/Wedge, actually... ways to get meaningful reports for things. But I'm not sure I'd want it as a core feature.
Huh, a method to generate a mailing list, exporting selective email addresses from the forum. That could be a useful plugin.
Huh, a method to check vulnerable passwords (where it is the same as the account name)... this suggests vB's password hash is weak if it can do that. And there's a forcible reset option.
Group configuration is interesting - the group edit page contains most of the basic permissions too (remember: permissions are set as 'default' for the group then can be modified on a per board basis, it's actually quite elegant in a way). There's some other interesting ideas, like setting a password expiry time as well as disallowing older passwords.
Hmm, promotion, that's an interesting idea, auto move someone to a different group/add them to a new group if they get somewhere, for example the default example is to move someone from 'Registered Members' to another group, based on reputation of at least 1000, but you can use reputation, days registered and post count in any combination. The concept is fundamentally interesting to me as a management tool.
Social Groups - this is an interesting feature. Essentially it amounts to a sort of member-created board on the site where the owner can select who can see it (e.g. public, moderated access, invite only) and link images from the gallery to it. Could be a good plugin candidate for making a sort of social network.
Then we have infractions. This is also interesting to me as it relates to thoughts I've had. Functionally it is pretty comparable with SMF's, though you can ban users and bump users to a banned group for too many infraction points.
Then there's custom fields. It's pretty much equivalent functionally to SMF's. Maybe not quite so elegant but functionally equivalent. There is one thing, though, you can set the translation of the name and description to other languages should you want to, the system allows for that. It is also possible to create new categories for fields, but to me this seems like it'd be part of a general profile system anyway. Don't know yet.
Interesting that post count groups are fundamentally less important in vB. They're almost purely a display matter.
Ah, reputation. This is one of those very quirky things that people either love or hate. Essentially it is just about setting levels, titles for those levels and so on. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting that it's a core feature.
Huh, that's interesting. An option to move album pictures out of their current home. They can store them into the filesystem with or without direct access to thumbnails - but more interestingly, they are stored by default in the database itself. This is fundamentally interesting to me. It solves certain permissions issues, at a cost of performance and size.
Paid subscriptions is a built in feature, no surprise there. The general approach is much the same as SMF's - title, description, active/not active, options of what groups to add while the subscription is active. More curiously, it allows for resetting board access directly from the subscription manager. Not the way I'd do it, but I can see the logic in it.
More interestingly, you can set the price of subscriptions in multiple currencies at once - USD, GBP, EUR, AUD, CAD right from the off, plus setting the subscription length. Built in are PayPal, NOCHEX, Worldpay, Authorize.Net, 2Checkout, Moneybookers, CCBill. Some immediately curious matters - different backends require different information (something I'm not sure SMF/Wedge currently support), as well as having different currency support (also not sure it's supported). More interestingly, transactions are actually logged, so you can do searches and so on.
Avatars... seems fairly straightforward, again functionally comparable to what SMF/Wedge has, with the exception of an ability to upload new avatar sets directly from the ACP (as opposed to requiring a packaged solution via package manager)
Post icons, again, much the same as SMF/Wedge, with the difference that there isn't the obfuscation involved with 'enabling customised icons'. Ditto, for all of that, for smileys.
Custom bbcode, Their system isn't as flexible as SMF/Wedge, in that their setup only allows for one parameter per bbc, e.g. [tag=option][/tag]. I'm aware we don't have a bbcode editor, but we're going to get one :)
RSS feed poster... seems fairly straightforward. Interestingly, feeds can be posted to the announcement section (see previous), which is an interesting concept too.
Scheduled tasks, fairly straightforward too. Most of them have similar comparable options to what SMF/Wedge have, with the ability to actually add your own to it.
Plugin manager... huh, that's interesting. You can tell it to run a given piece of PHP at any of the in-built hook points. Curious, but very inefficient. It also amazes me how many hooks vB 3 has - it makes the list in SMF (2.0 at least) and Wedge look tame.
There's also a nice report section where you can get things like subsets of the main reports and logs, based on time/date, including other things like the paid subscriptions system.
Maintenance... this is very interesting. There's a backup - and it even tells you that you should instead use save-to-server (!) or backup via command line (for which it looks like there's a bundled script in the main vB package)
There's also the facility whereby you can individually repair/optimise tables (as opposed to all at once), plus rebuilding individual bits of cache. I am intrigued by the diagnostics area, which allows testing of uploads, testing of email sending, checking file versions, and can do some tests against server modules, for example trying to detect issues with mod_security out of the box.
That's all very, very interesting. I'd argue a lot of it is overkill, but it does provide a lot of food for thought.
The moderation panel is, in practicality, a specific subset of the admin panel rather than a completely separate area now that I look at it, so I'll leave that for now.
I will play around with vB 3 a bit longer to see if anything occurs to me.
First, logging back in. Why, oh why, oh why, is there this insane 'Thank you for logging in. We will redirect you in a moment.' screen?
I don't have any posts or threads that are currently moderated, so I can't take a look at them yet :/
OK, attachments. This is curious. You can set the allowed extensions, maximum size per extension, thumbnail size per extension and stuff like that. What's most curious is that .jpeg files are allowed to be only 20000 bytes while .jpg files are capped at 100000, and .jpeg has a max size of 620x280 as opposed to no upper limit of image dimensions. More interestingly you can set HTTP headers to be sent with such files. Quite why you'd need to is a little beyond me right now, but the fact the option is provided is certainly curious. Wait... you can even set these limits per filetype per user, meaning you can limit max file and image sizes per type per user, e.g. one group is limited to 20K, 620x280 BMP files, while another could be 1MB, 4096x3072 for the same if you wanted.
You can also search attachments, by size, popularity, oldest/newest, plus getting rid of old attachments, as well as searching by name/who attached/attached before or after a given date, by more/less than a given number of downloads, by size, visibility and stuff like that. It's very thorough.
Then I get to add new user... holy shit there is a lot of options. I mean seriously... holy hell there is a lot here. From the one screen, you can set near enough everything that's in the user profile (user, password, email, language, user title, website, birthday, signature, ICQ/AIM/Y!M/MSN/Skype, whether a COPPA user or not, referrer, IP address, post count, avatar, profile picture, signature picture, other custom profile fields, all the primary/secondary groups, reputation, warnings, and pretty much all the user preferences that are on offer. It's truly enormous.
There's also some other interesting features - a built in referrals system, which you can get nice reports from. That's something that seems lacking in SMF/Wedge, actually... ways to get meaningful reports for things. But I'm not sure I'd want it as a core feature.
Huh, a method to generate a mailing list, exporting selective email addresses from the forum. That could be a useful plugin.
Huh, a method to check vulnerable passwords (where it is the same as the account name)... this suggests vB's password hash is weak if it can do that. And there's a forcible reset option.
Group configuration is interesting - the group edit page contains most of the basic permissions too (remember: permissions are set as 'default' for the group then can be modified on a per board basis, it's actually quite elegant in a way). There's some other interesting ideas, like setting a password expiry time as well as disallowing older passwords.
Hmm, promotion, that's an interesting idea, auto move someone to a different group/add them to a new group if they get somewhere, for example the default example is to move someone from 'Registered Members' to another group, based on reputation of at least 1000, but you can use reputation, days registered and post count in any combination. The concept is fundamentally interesting to me as a management tool.
Social Groups - this is an interesting feature. Essentially it amounts to a sort of member-created board on the site where the owner can select who can see it (e.g. public, moderated access, invite only) and link images from the gallery to it. Could be a good plugin candidate for making a sort of social network.
Then we have infractions. This is also interesting to me as it relates to thoughts I've had. Functionally it is pretty comparable with SMF's, though you can ban users and bump users to a banned group for too many infraction points.
Then there's custom fields. It's pretty much equivalent functionally to SMF's. Maybe not quite so elegant but functionally equivalent. There is one thing, though, you can set the translation of the name and description to other languages should you want to, the system allows for that. It is also possible to create new categories for fields, but to me this seems like it'd be part of a general profile system anyway. Don't know yet.
Interesting that post count groups are fundamentally less important in vB. They're almost purely a display matter.
Ah, reputation. This is one of those very quirky things that people either love or hate. Essentially it is just about setting levels, titles for those levels and so on. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting that it's a core feature.
Huh, that's interesting. An option to move album pictures out of their current home. They can store them into the filesystem with or without direct access to thumbnails - but more interestingly, they are stored by default in the database itself. This is fundamentally interesting to me. It solves certain permissions issues, at a cost of performance and size.
Paid subscriptions is a built in feature, no surprise there. The general approach is much the same as SMF's - title, description, active/not active, options of what groups to add while the subscription is active. More curiously, it allows for resetting board access directly from the subscription manager. Not the way I'd do it, but I can see the logic in it.
More interestingly, you can set the price of subscriptions in multiple currencies at once - USD, GBP, EUR, AUD, CAD right from the off, plus setting the subscription length. Built in are PayPal, NOCHEX, Worldpay, Authorize.Net, 2Checkout, Moneybookers, CCBill. Some immediately curious matters - different backends require different information (something I'm not sure SMF/Wedge currently support), as well as having different currency support (also not sure it's supported). More interestingly, transactions are actually logged, so you can do searches and so on.
Avatars... seems fairly straightforward, again functionally comparable to what SMF/Wedge has, with the exception of an ability to upload new avatar sets directly from the ACP (as opposed to requiring a packaged solution via package manager)
Post icons, again, much the same as SMF/Wedge, with the difference that there isn't the obfuscation involved with 'enabling customised icons'. Ditto, for all of that, for smileys.
Custom bbcode, Their system isn't as flexible as SMF/Wedge, in that their setup only allows for one parameter per bbc, e.g. [tag=option][/tag]. I'm aware we don't have a bbcode editor, but we're going to get one :)
RSS feed poster... seems fairly straightforward. Interestingly, feeds can be posted to the announcement section (see previous), which is an interesting concept too.
Scheduled tasks, fairly straightforward too. Most of them have similar comparable options to what SMF/Wedge have, with the ability to actually add your own to it.
Plugin manager... huh, that's interesting. You can tell it to run a given piece of PHP at any of the in-built hook points. Curious, but very inefficient. It also amazes me how many hooks vB 3 has - it makes the list in SMF (2.0 at least) and Wedge look tame.
There's also a nice report section where you can get things like subsets of the main reports and logs, based on time/date, including other things like the paid subscriptions system.
Maintenance... this is very interesting. There's a backup - and it even tells you that you should instead use save-to-server (!) or backup via command line (for which it looks like there's a bundled script in the main vB package)
There's also the facility whereby you can individually repair/optimise tables (as opposed to all at once), plus rebuilding individual bits of cache. I am intrigued by the diagnostics area, which allows testing of uploads, testing of email sending, checking file versions, and can do some tests against server modules, for example trying to detect issues with mod_security out of the box.
That's all very, very interesting. I'd argue a lot of it is overkill, but it does provide a lot of food for thought.
The moderation panel is, in practicality, a specific subset of the admin panel rather than a completely separate area now that I look at it, so I'll leave that for now.
I will play around with vB 3 a bit longer to see if anything occurs to me.
1487
Off-topic / System visitations: vB 3.8.7
« on February 23rd, 2013, 05:48 AM »
So, some of you know that I own licences for different systems. I consider it a valid research expense and I don't mind shelling out to do proper research for what I really care about. I have current licences for XenForo, IPB and yesterday I picked up a vB licence which means I have an active installation of vB 3, vB 4 and vB 5 to play with. I will get round to the others in time, but vB 3 is what I'm looking at right now.
I'm not going to post screenshots, but I'm going to share my reactions and thoughts to these things as I find them. It may be interesting to someone, it may not, I don't know. All of this is on localhost and I don't really care about performance at this stage. I'm not even going to really touch on the user end so much, because from a user aspect they all seem to be mostly consistent. But if I get time I'll look at it.
Admin Panel
This is the first time I've seen the vB admin panel. Having seen a 3.6 or 3.7 moderation panel, the use of frames doesn't surprise me. Yes, ACTUAL FRAMES. Not even iframes.
My first reaction, though, is fuck, it's ugly. I don't even want to call it utilitarian, because while it is functional, it is ugly. I like beauty in my toys.
There are some interesting things to this though - we have a side menu with a shit-ton of first level options: vBulletin Options, Styles & Templates, Langages & Phrases, FAQ, Notices, Announcements, Forums & Moderators, Calendars, Threads & Posts, Thread Prefixes, Moderation, Attachments, Users, Usergroups, Social Groups, User Infractions, User Profile Fields, User Ranks, User Reputations, User Albums, User Titles, Paid Subscriptions, Avatars, Post Icons, Smilies, Custom BB Codes, RSS Feeds, Scheduled Tasks, Plugins & Products, Statistics & Logs, Maintenance.
Monkey butts, that's a lot of stuff. It intrigues me on a number of levels. Firstly... it does mean that everything most people would want is available out of the box, and presumably maintained up to the same standard as the core. Once you get the core dev out of the way, maintenance should be relatively easy.
I gotta say it does make me pause to reflect on what I want to see as a core feature versus what should be a plugin and I just know that's going to cause trouble, especially if I intend to monetise any of them.
Let's kick off. vBulletin Options has... vBulletin Options as the first menu item, which takes me to a page where I can select from about 40 areas, ranging from 'Turn Your vBulletin On and Off', 'Site Name / URL / Contact Details', through Date and Time Options, Email Options, Social Group Options and so on. In other words, collating all the very generic options pages in one place. Interesting tactic. I don't like it, but it's interesting.[1]
Anyway, lots and lots of pages of settings. Most of them seem fairly straightforward and most of them have mostly similar analogues to SMF and Wedge - if you've cruised through the admin panel and seen any of the generic pages you will have seen this, mostly. Though I will note that their UI is arranged to scroll downwards a lot and have concentrated pages with lots of stuff in, as opposed to more but shorter pages. I'm not intrinsically opposed to lots and lots of options, but there are definitely cases of 'less is more' and anyone who knows me will know I like keeping related functionality together.
Interesting to see that 'Social Bookmarking' is still a feature - back in the days before we had Facebook and Twitter and G+ everywhere, we had Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google's social bookmarking feature. You can't even make this stuff up. (And yes, vB has it built in, but with built in support for it. This intrigues me, actually. I don't want it in the core but I can see people think it should be.)
Ah, the Style Manager, I've been curious about this for a while. Editing templates in the DB, they said. Safer than using real code, they said.
But DAMN.
Code: [Select]
Code: [Select]
Just... eew. Seriously, I get the idea of a template engine, be that Smarty or TOX-G or whatever. I understand the logic and have in the past recommended it in certain circumstances. But this hellspawn bastardisation of HTML, meta HTML and PHP in line? What the Serious FUCK is this?
The ability to configure basic CSS variables with a *nice* interface (and this is easily the nicest UI I've seen yet in vB 3, though I gotta say, it's not a complete trainwreck) is interesting. I have attached a screenshot. I'm not saying I want it in the core, because I don't, but it is fundamentally an interesting concept.
Then we have the language editor. Given current stuff, this intrigues me too, to see what they've done with it, knowing full well what I'd probably find. The amount of configuration is surprising even for me, especially as I plan to remove most of the configurability of 'key' items out of the language editor. It strikes me as something that is surprisingly low use. The actual language editor part itself is completely as expected, with some nice quirks around searching for languages. The quirk primarily that comes to mind is 'overkill'.
FAQ... oh, this is nice, a built in FAQ editor. What's more interesting is that this is the one way I'd be encouraged to re-add the help tab: by making it entirely configurable. You create items which can have child items again and again, it's all very straightforward really. As many levels as you want, as many siblings in a given level. Then we have the UI. I have seen this in XF and there it looked incongruous. Here... it's oddly in character but still unnecessary.
Every item has a 'display order'. Yup, you put in a number to indicate what position these things should be in. Now, I get that. Internally, that's exactly how it works. You have a number and it indicates position. Except there's no need to show the *user* that. Back in the early 2000s, maybe, but it's definitely a relic of back then. (Note, SMF never showed big ol' lists of display numbers to people even back then.) Everything else is straightforward enough there, though the fact it's showing me the unprocessed code is slightly disturbing (yay for more yucky mashup languages!) but I'll let it slide. It's workable if ugly.
Notices... now this is a feature I haven't seen before, or if I have I haven't made a mental note of it (though I believe XF has something similar, I just never dug in enough). A Notice, essentially, is a block of code shown at the top of the page based on matching conditions, e.g. show a given block if the user is/isn't a given group, is in a given board/its sub-boards, using a given style, user has not visited lately, user has between x and y posts, user has no posts, user has given amount of reputation, infractions, PM storage, username... the list goes on. Pretty much anything you can conveniently imagine would cover it, I think.
Now this is an interesting concept for me. It means you could put ads in it if you so desired, sure, but you could also do so much more with it. One admin I know uses this to handle birthday wishes to his users (since there's a notice for when it's their birthday), to the point where I'd probably want to put it in the core rather than rely on it being a plugin, even if I wrote it. It's sufficiently useful, I think, that it could justify itself.
Announcements - a similar idea but intended to be shortlived rather than general notices. The idea is that you get what amounts to a posting box, a start and an end date and some minor formatting options and get to display notices like that. It's an interesting idea for quick notifications that have higher prominence than pinned topics and that will automatically fade away later on - and don't allow for comments.
Then we get to the Forum Manager - remember, vB calls them forums not boards. Yay for Display Order number boxes. This is intriguing... we have some of the typical stuff - title, description, redirection, default sort order[2] and there's some stuff I wouldn't have thought of.
You can add a list of email addresses to notify when there's a new post or topic in that board. You can also, from main board configuration, turn on post/thread/attachment moderation right there. Interesting. I won't be changing our moderation filters any time soon but it is interesting.
Interesting what other things are set - you can disable bbcode/smileys/img bbc/post icons etc all by board. I find this fascinating that you have this much control - and mostly unnecessary. I have yet to encounter a situation where I'd want one board to have these and not another.
Permissions, ah how we love thee. Wait... you can remove admins' permissions in a board? Seriously? (Actually, that's an interesting concept. I know cases where users have asked about it for specific and unusual reasons.)
Other than that the approach seems to be reasonably sane - set defaults per user group then let them either use the default or set by board. Hell to manage on larger configurations with many boards of course (which is why SMF went to board profiles in the first place).
Calendar... not really a great amount to say, looks like much the same as I'd envisaged our calendar becoming really.
Threads and Posts... lots of loving pruning (first/last post min/max days ago, min/max replies, min/max views, include/ignore pinned topics, include/ignore unapproved/deleted/locked/redirect) or even base it on who made the topic, what the topic's title is, what board(s) in question... it's very thorough, but like other things perhaps too thorough. I get the feeling it's a bit like they put everything they could think of in, good idea or not. There's also move topics between boards, same criteria. Plus you can... remove the poll on a topic if you know it's id? Then we have who voted what, and interestingly enough to prune edit history. Edit history is a core feature, interesting.
Thread prefixes... interesting idea. I can see the use for this in some contexts and some kinds of sites, not sure I'd want it as a core feature but for those who would use it, it is often a make or break feature. The features do not surprise me particularly, the only thing that does is the fact is demands people provide both plain text (for old fashioned dropdowns) and rich text displays.
Bah, soon be time for bed and so much more to explore. More when I've been to bed.
I'm not going to post screenshots, but I'm going to share my reactions and thoughts to these things as I find them. It may be interesting to someone, it may not, I don't know. All of this is on localhost and I don't really care about performance at this stage. I'm not even going to really touch on the user end so much, because from a user aspect they all seem to be mostly consistent. But if I get time I'll look at it.
Admin Panel
This is the first time I've seen the vB admin panel. Having seen a 3.6 or 3.7 moderation panel, the use of frames doesn't surprise me. Yes, ACTUAL FRAMES. Not even iframes.
My first reaction, though, is fuck, it's ugly. I don't even want to call it utilitarian, because while it is functional, it is ugly. I like beauty in my toys.
There are some interesting things to this though - we have a side menu with a shit-ton of first level options: vBulletin Options, Styles & Templates, Langages & Phrases, FAQ, Notices, Announcements, Forums & Moderators, Calendars, Threads & Posts, Thread Prefixes, Moderation, Attachments, Users, Usergroups, Social Groups, User Infractions, User Profile Fields, User Ranks, User Reputations, User Albums, User Titles, Paid Subscriptions, Avatars, Post Icons, Smilies, Custom BB Codes, RSS Feeds, Scheduled Tasks, Plugins & Products, Statistics & Logs, Maintenance.
Monkey butts, that's a lot of stuff. It intrigues me on a number of levels. Firstly... it does mean that everything most people would want is available out of the box, and presumably maintained up to the same standard as the core. Once you get the core dev out of the way, maintenance should be relatively easy.
I gotta say it does make me pause to reflect on what I want to see as a core feature versus what should be a plugin and I just know that's going to cause trouble, especially if I intend to monetise any of them.
Let's kick off. vBulletin Options has... vBulletin Options as the first menu item, which takes me to a page where I can select from about 40 areas, ranging from 'Turn Your vBulletin On and Off', 'Site Name / URL / Contact Details', through Date and Time Options, Email Options, Social Group Options and so on. In other words, collating all the very generic options pages in one place. Interesting tactic. I don't like it, but it's interesting.[1]
Anyway, lots and lots of pages of settings. Most of them seem fairly straightforward and most of them have mostly similar analogues to SMF and Wedge - if you've cruised through the admin panel and seen any of the generic pages you will have seen this, mostly. Though I will note that their UI is arranged to scroll downwards a lot and have concentrated pages with lots of stuff in, as opposed to more but shorter pages. I'm not intrinsically opposed to lots and lots of options, but there are definitely cases of 'less is more' and anyone who knows me will know I like keeping related functionality together.
Interesting to see that 'Social Bookmarking' is still a feature - back in the days before we had Facebook and Twitter and G+ everywhere, we had Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google's social bookmarking feature. You can't even make this stuff up. (And yes, vB has it built in, but with built in support for it. This intrigues me, actually. I don't want it in the core but I can see people think it should be.)
Ah, the Style Manager, I've been curious about this for a while. Editing templates in the DB, they said. Safer than using real code, they said.
But DAMN.
$template_hook[postbit_start]
<table class="tborder" id="post$post[postid]" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center"> <div id="postmenu_$post[postid]">
<if condition="$show['profile']">
<a class="bigusername" href="member.php?$session[sessionurl]u=$post[userid]">$post[musername]</a>
$post[onlinestatus]
<script type="text/javascript"> vbmenu_register("postmenu_$post[postid]", true); </script>
<else />
$post[musername]
</if>
</div>Just... eew. Seriously, I get the idea of a template engine, be that Smarty or TOX-G or whatever. I understand the logic and have in the past recommended it in certain circumstances. But this hellspawn bastardisation of HTML, meta HTML and PHP in line? What the Serious FUCK is this?
The ability to configure basic CSS variables with a *nice* interface (and this is easily the nicest UI I've seen yet in vB 3, though I gotta say, it's not a complete trainwreck) is interesting. I have attached a screenshot. I'm not saying I want it in the core, because I don't, but it is fundamentally an interesting concept.
Then we have the language editor. Given current stuff, this intrigues me too, to see what they've done with it, knowing full well what I'd probably find. The amount of configuration is surprising even for me, especially as I plan to remove most of the configurability of 'key' items out of the language editor. It strikes me as something that is surprisingly low use. The actual language editor part itself is completely as expected, with some nice quirks around searching for languages. The quirk primarily that comes to mind is 'overkill'.
FAQ... oh, this is nice, a built in FAQ editor. What's more interesting is that this is the one way I'd be encouraged to re-add the help tab: by making it entirely configurable. You create items which can have child items again and again, it's all very straightforward really. As many levels as you want, as many siblings in a given level. Then we have the UI. I have seen this in XF and there it looked incongruous. Here... it's oddly in character but still unnecessary.
Every item has a 'display order'. Yup, you put in a number to indicate what position these things should be in. Now, I get that. Internally, that's exactly how it works. You have a number and it indicates position. Except there's no need to show the *user* that. Back in the early 2000s, maybe, but it's definitely a relic of back then. (Note, SMF never showed big ol' lists of display numbers to people even back then.) Everything else is straightforward enough there, though the fact it's showing me the unprocessed code is slightly disturbing (yay for more yucky mashup languages!) but I'll let it slide. It's workable if ugly.
Notices... now this is a feature I haven't seen before, or if I have I haven't made a mental note of it (though I believe XF has something similar, I just never dug in enough). A Notice, essentially, is a block of code shown at the top of the page based on matching conditions, e.g. show a given block if the user is/isn't a given group, is in a given board/its sub-boards, using a given style, user has not visited lately, user has between x and y posts, user has no posts, user has given amount of reputation, infractions, PM storage, username... the list goes on. Pretty much anything you can conveniently imagine would cover it, I think.
Now this is an interesting concept for me. It means you could put ads in it if you so desired, sure, but you could also do so much more with it. One admin I know uses this to handle birthday wishes to his users (since there's a notice for when it's their birthday), to the point where I'd probably want to put it in the core rather than rely on it being a plugin, even if I wrote it. It's sufficiently useful, I think, that it could justify itself.
Announcements - a similar idea but intended to be shortlived rather than general notices. The idea is that you get what amounts to a posting box, a start and an end date and some minor formatting options and get to display notices like that. It's an interesting idea for quick notifications that have higher prominence than pinned topics and that will automatically fade away later on - and don't allow for comments.
Then we get to the Forum Manager - remember, vB calls them forums not boards. Yay for Display Order number boxes. This is intriguing... we have some of the typical stuff - title, description, redirection, default sort order[2] and there's some stuff I wouldn't have thought of.
You can add a list of email addresses to notify when there's a new post or topic in that board. You can also, from main board configuration, turn on post/thread/attachment moderation right there. Interesting. I won't be changing our moderation filters any time soon but it is interesting.
Interesting what other things are set - you can disable bbcode/smileys/img bbc/post icons etc all by board. I find this fascinating that you have this much control - and mostly unnecessary. I have yet to encounter a situation where I'd want one board to have these and not another.
Permissions, ah how we love thee. Wait... you can remove admins' permissions in a board? Seriously? (Actually, that's an interesting concept. I know cases where users have asked about it for specific and unusual reasons.)
Other than that the approach seems to be reasonably sane - set defaults per user group then let them either use the default or set by board. Hell to manage on larger configurations with many boards of course (which is why SMF went to board profiles in the first place).
Calendar... not really a great amount to say, looks like much the same as I'd envisaged our calendar becoming really.
Threads and Posts... lots of loving pruning (first/last post min/max days ago, min/max replies, min/max views, include/ignore pinned topics, include/ignore unapproved/deleted/locked/redirect) or even base it on who made the topic, what the topic's title is, what board(s) in question... it's very thorough, but like other things perhaps too thorough. I get the feeling it's a bit like they put everything they could think of in, good idea or not. There's also move topics between boards, same criteria. Plus you can... remove the poll on a topic if you know it's id? Then we have who voted what, and interestingly enough to prune edit history. Edit history is a core feature, interesting.
Thread prefixes... interesting idea. I can see the use for this in some contexts and some kinds of sites, not sure I'd want it as a core feature but for those who would use it, it is often a make or break feature. The features do not surprise me particularly, the only thing that does is the fact is demands people provide both plain text (for old fashioned dropdowns) and rich text displays.
Bah, soon be time for bed and so much more to explore. More when I've been to bed.
| 1. | I don't want to derail myself but a very vivid thought here is the similarity to how XenForo arranges itself much the same, and I suspect Kier was largely responsible. |
| 2. | Did I actually make a UI item for that already? I don't think I did :/ |
1488
Archived fixes / Drafts aren't being pruned properly
« on February 23rd, 2013, 04:59 AM »
For some reason drafts aren't returning AJAXively properly. I suspect the change of AJAX vs $_REQUEST['xml'] is to blame (it is there in the post workflow for a reason, but I'm busy, will review it tomorrow)
1489
Features / Re: New revs
« on February 23rd, 2013, 03:47 AM »
(4 files, 2KB, not sure I like these little commits much.)
Revision: 1947
Author: arantor
Date: 23 February 2013 02:46:14
Message:
! Technically CAPTCHA was a section, not a setting. (Admin.php)
! SMF bug 4640: remove index not used in any queries from log_activity table. (install.sql)
! SMF bug 4929: global variable overwritten in a loop. (MessageIndex.php)
! Stupidly used the wrong variable in the language area. No biggie, just meant all languages appeared to be RTL (even though they're not) (ManageLanguages.php)
----
Modified : /trunk/Sources/Admin.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/ManageLanguages.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/MessageIndex.php
Modified : /trunk/root/install.sql
Revision: 1947
Author: arantor
Date: 23 February 2013 02:46:14
Message:
! Technically CAPTCHA was a section, not a setting. (Admin.php)
! SMF bug 4640: remove index not used in any queries from log_activity table. (install.sql)
! SMF bug 4929: global variable overwritten in a loop. (MessageIndex.php)
! Stupidly used the wrong variable in the language area. No biggie, just meant all languages appeared to be RTL (even though they're not) (ManageLanguages.php)
----
Modified : /trunk/Sources/Admin.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/ManageLanguages.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/MessageIndex.php
Modified : /trunk/root/install.sql
1490
Archived fixes / Re: Quick edit bug: Quotes turn into backslash
« on February 23rd, 2013, 01:42 AM »
See http://wedge.org/pub/bugs/7661/minor-quick-edit-bug/
Same basic bug, all because we don't output everything as htmlspecialchars with ENT_QUOTES.
Same basic bug, all because we don't output everything as htmlspecialchars with ENT_QUOTES.
1491
Archived fixes / Re: Tooltips for "like" buttons inconsistent
« on February 23rd, 2013, 01:27 AM »
Oh, I use it occasionally if I can't be arsed actually loading the popup (e.g. only one like) but yeah, that's what I'm thinking too.
Would be nice to trim all the surrounding language strings that I spent so long figuring out hahahahaha
Would be nice to trim all the surrounding language strings that I spent so long figuring out hahahahaha
1492
Features / Re: New revs
« on February 23rd, 2013, 01:17 AM »
(4 files, 2KB)
Revision: 1946
Author: arantor
Date: 23 February 2013 00:16:32
Message:
! Forgot global variable for language editing system. (ManageMail.php)
! Merging moving topic notices is... um... bad. It's totally 'crossing the streams' bad. Don't do it. (Display.php, Merge.php, Errors language file)
----
Modified : /trunk/Sources/Display.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/ManageMail.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/Merge.php
Modified : /trunk/Themes/default/languages/Errors.english.php
Revision: 1946
Author: arantor
Date: 23 February 2013 00:16:32
Message:
! Forgot global variable for language editing system. (ManageMail.php)
! Merging moving topic notices is... um... bad. It's totally 'crossing the streams' bad. Don't do it. (Display.php, Merge.php, Errors language file)
----
Modified : /trunk/Sources/Display.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/ManageMail.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/Merge.php
Modified : /trunk/Themes/default/languages/Errors.english.php
1493
Archived fixes / Re: Tooltips forr "like" buttons inconsistent
« on February 23rd, 2013, 01:06 AM »
That's because on your own posts you don't have a link to click on ;)
I've not been satisfied with the whole tooltip thing since we dropped the text from being inline in the first place. See, if you remember, originally it would state the "You, x, y and z others like this" inline. Then we dropped it for just the number.
So before worrying about where the tooltip is, we should be asking whether we even need the tooltip... do we?
(If not, a lot of things suddenly get simpler.)
I've not been satisfied with the whole tooltip thing since we dropped the text from being inline in the first place. See, if you remember, originally it would state the "You, x, y and z others like this" inline. Then we dropped it for just the number.
So before worrying about where the tooltip is, we should be asking whether we even need the tooltip... do we?
(If not, a lot of things suddenly get simpler.)
1494
Archived fixes / Re: Uninitialized string offset in Subs-BBC.php, line 1133
« on February 23rd, 2013, 12:51 AM »
Monkey butts. OK, so here's the deal... the file cache wasn't cleared, and due to a bug in the email template editor, I can't clear just that part of the language cache manually - and I'm reluctant to nuke the entire language cache >_<
All I need is a silly addition of $cachedir to the global list in ManageMail.php, ModifyEmailTemplates() and I could fix all this at least as a workaround >_<
All I need is a silly addition of $cachedir to the global list in ManageMail.php, ModifyEmailTemplates() and I could fix all this at least as a workaround >_<
1495
Archived fixes / Re: Uninitialized string offset in Subs-BBC.php, line 1133
« on February 23rd, 2013, 12:46 AM »
That would suggest the language cache didn't get cleared out when the latest revs were added here.
I'll investigate.
I'll investigate.
1496
Bug reports / Re: Mini-menu implementation
« on February 23rd, 2013, 12:39 AM »
Yay for mobile bugginess? iOS has done something similar for a while actually, bumping you back to whatever # you were on (which made using the top menu to return to the front page impossible without scrolling up there twice from a thread but that's another story)
1497
Features / Re: Pages: [1] 2 3 styling
« on February 23rd, 2013, 12:33 AM »
Anyone else have anything to add about the spacing? I would kind of like to commit it. ;)
Bump for great justice. This is a surprisingly important topic for me.
Posted: February 16th, 2013, 09:44 PM
Bump for great justice. This is a surprisingly important topic for me.
1498
Bug reports / Re: Mini-menu implementation
« on February 23rd, 2013, 12:30 AM »
Worry about it when you feel better ;)
1499
The Pub / Re: Language editing inside Wedge
« on February 22nd, 2013, 09:06 PM »
Actually, there is one way it could be used to optimise performance, but it's going to take me a little while to figure out how exactly to do it without more breakages ;)
Right now we load English as a fallback. What occurs to me is that we could load English, load the other language, then the DB query, then cache the result so we wouldn't have duplicate loads for non English languages.
It would also mean that the English UK pack would simply be the changes from the default, and we could expand upon that by having other language packs be able to declare a fallback as well, e.g. Portuguese (Brazil) vs Portuguese (Portugal) if that makes sense.
Is complicated, but should make it possible.
Right now we load English as a fallback. What occurs to me is that we could load English, load the other language, then the DB query, then cache the result so we wouldn't have duplicate loads for non English languages.
It would also mean that the English UK pack would simply be the changes from the default, and we could expand upon that by having other language packs be able to declare a fallback as well, e.g. Portuguese (Brazil) vs Portuguese (Portugal) if that makes sense.
Is complicated, but should make it possible.
1500
Archived fixes / Re: Media page notice(s)
« on February 22nd, 2013, 08:12 PM »
This should be fixed in the latest SVN revision (since it was all interrelated)
Question does stand though: what does aeva_timeformat() do that the core timeformat functions don't?
Question does stand though: what does aeva_timeformat() do that the core timeformat functions don't?