Wedge

Looks good :)

Could use a touch of space between the bottom link tree and the footer, and perhaps a bit of space between the top tree and the menu, which dropping the dotted border on the menu.

I'm intending to have a vetting process, yes.

And yes, I can imagine there would be some collaboration, though I did.add some small features that would help.

Almost nothing gets cached anyway.

I can't just blindly remove everything because other parts still use it! Do a search on read_tgz and see what you find...

Yes even Aeva uses it...

Passing an array should not be significantly more expensive than passing a scalar variable.

And yes, stuff I haven't removed yet may still have some small use.

Eh, just ping the server once a week/month/whatever and if it returns a 404, it's dead. No extra effort required.OK, I did explain how this is going to work, knowing as I do the realities of pirated software.

I can't prevent nulled copies getting out there. It sucks, but it's true. It's not hard to find nulled copies of anything if you try.

On the other hand, I really don't want to get into the rabbit hole of licence key activation for the simple reason that it can and will put legitimate people off. As it is, InvisionPower marks my IPB test site inactive periodically and I have to go and re-validate my licence with them. Not even kidding >_<

It is my belief that it actually limits people unnecessarily more than it prevents piracy. In any case, no support without valid licence. And that's easy enough to deal with as it comes up, just as it is on sm.org with pirated DzinerStudio - ask them why they're not asking for support on the DS board. And lock it when it inevitably becomes clear.

As far as licensing goes, I already figured how I intend to do it. The idea is that you save the username and password in your forum (and they're hashed, of course) for your account on the plugin server, and then your install contacts the plugin server, providing authentication details, and the list of plugins you get back is what you have on your account.

Other stuff, like auto checking plugins for updates... not yet figured out how best to do that.

There's two versions of Aeva - Aeva Lite, and Aeva Media. Aeva Lite is purely the embedder, Aeva Media is the full gallery as well - and both are built into Wedge. Aeva is what has been used here thus far to serve the alphas and all the plugins we already wrote.

The plugin repo site will be similar in a number of ways to SMF's mod site, but with a few other... twists... in mind that will likely be pretty much unique to the main site.

Demo is a bit trickier to pull off, because ain't no way I'm giving out admin access to the admin panel to access things ;) But I can well imagine there being a link to a site where you can see it.

I should add, some of the plugins on the site I have in mind will be paid-for plugins. Exactly how that's going to work, I don't know yet, but that's what's going to happen, e.g. some of the bigger and rarer-used packages I have in mind will be paid-for plugins. But I'm building the add-plugin stuff to allow for repositories where you have to provide a username/password combo anyway.

Hmm, maybe, but if you're not up to creating even a modest UI, how much of a plugin are you writing anyway?