Wedge

Signature permission was not carried through, it should work as expected now.

As for that error, we have seen it, just not sure why it occurs.

These are all 'default' material with minor exceptions:

Select default smiley set for this theme - this is actually stating that you can set a default set of smileys for each theme should you want to. Though I never knew a site that did. It is the one of the only 'actual' theme options here where it makes a difference but that I wouldn't bother with it.

Forum width: - probably the only option I can justify being a theme option. Yes, you can do that in custom.css but there is a certain convenience to having it in there and be a theme option.

Failing that, can we figure out something that is a genuine theme-specific option so that I can build something for themers to use and that is also searchable?

It's not implemented currently (at least, I don't remember it being implemented currently!) however, there is a column in the boards table called id_owner, which has that purpose in mind.

For the most part, really, we're talking about properly managing the admin panel UI and permissions for that, rather than anything else, since pretty much everything else will fall into place pretty naturally.

That said, there's still plenty to do in the board configuration, making that properly extensible for one, and finishing off all the tendrils attached to the board permissions setup we have (it's possible to handle allow/no-allow/deny permissions for both viewing and entering a board, per group, all independently of each other, and the UI is built for the board's own configuration, but not anywhere else where groups can be configured with a list of boards, yay)

I do that anyway, even now. Predominantly it's the people that complain about not having 'Wedge right now' or wanting to know where they can download it without bothering to notice that it isn't for download at present.

Now, I know I can handle the support load, I certainly was able to cope with a decent chunk of SMF's for the time I was on the team, and I know Wedge far better than I knew SMF's code back then. So it does come back to temper and so on.

Mind you, there is one important difference between my position with Wedge and my position with SMF... if something is obviously broken in Wedge, I'm going to fix it, and by 'broken' I don't just mean 'actively buggy'.

My favourite examples of this are:
* return to topic after posting
* OMG people can see topics they're not supposed to be able to on Who's Online

The return to topic after posting is one of those things I never really quite understood why it was so important. But it is important for many people. Now, given how many people ask about it on sm.org, you'd start to wonder why no-one ever thought of making it the default. But from what I remember, it was suggested and shot down for some reason. I have no idea why, I think it would be a sensible thing to make a default for.

As for the who's online thing, I know precisely why it's done that way - you as an admin can see every topic. Consequently, you can see all the topic titles. But the user can't, if they can't see the topic. So you have to reassure people about this.

Now, there's three ways you can deal with this situation. You can do what SMF does, and regularly reassure people that it's all good. You could go a step further and document it in the manual, and link people to it when they ask, something I hope will happen with the wiki, but I don't know. Or you could actually go a step further and attempt to fix it. I came up with a solution prior to starting on Wedge, I even discussed it with Norv at the time, and the best I got was a polite 'hmm, interesting'. So naturally, I added it to Wedge without any hesitation![1]

This is something that appeals to me as a developer: if someone keeps asking about something, it suggests there's a problem, so instead of explaining it, fix it so it doesn't need explaining.

The ultimate goal is to make the software not require much in the way of general support, so that support issues are for real bugs and genuine problems, not software-usability created issues (which is a *significant* factor in SMF's support area right now)

1.	Specifically, if the user has an error, log that fact in the online log, so when you go to the who's online page, you can see that a user was trying to do something but got a warning when doing so.

Also known as SNO[1] or SNM[2], yeah, I can see the appeal.

The bottom line, as ever, is that if you create great content, people will want to link to you. Create great content, make it easy for people to share that content and you'll clean up.

1.	Social Networking Optimisation
2.	Social Network Marketing

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.

Fair call. Just remember that I changed the semantics very slightly in how they work. Theme id should be 1, then as per my comment:

There are times it wouldn't necessarily be like that, especially if there were other themes involved. But it's always those values and always theme id 1 now. (0 is for the cases where it is a theme option as indicated by Current Theme)Go on then, the IPs are pretty consistent. Failing that, do it based on the contents of HTTP_USER_AGENT in the .htaccess file ;)Saturday morning for the move.