Wedge

Nope, it was never going to be totally removed and never to be seen again. In fact, there's a problem before you start: birthday emails are sent independently of whether the calendar is enabled. Talk about logic disjoint.Birth date needs to remain in the core, oddly enough, because it's used for things like COPPA verification.

Yes, but do they actually *use* it?

Hands up who remembers Sony's infamous removal of OtherOS from PS3? There was a fairly huge outcry - even though 95%+ of users who complained don't use it.

That's something that I've been aware of for a while but never fully understood the dynamics of: people get very upset when you remove a choice from them, even if it's a choice they would probably never actually take. The mere fact of taking away that choice riles them up.

Author is doable; the author is available from the list of plugins, but plugin type... there's nothing in a plugin to indicate what type of plugin it is, and from experience I don't really want it to be. It's why, for example, sm.org's mod site has a lot of "New Features" and "Feature Enhancements" that aren't really either.

The only way around that would be to define the classifications up front and make them fixed (and don't provide a generic one) but that causes people to limit themselves, I find.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Sure they are, which is why they're part of the calendar, no?

OK, let me put down how I see it. It might make a difference, it might not.[1]

Whether we like it or not, Wedge isn't a forum. It's a framework first and foremost, that just happens to be tuned to running a forum. User authentication, the template system, plugin system, these are all symptoms of a framework. As are a good deal of the components actually in Wedge.

Now, from my perspective, if it is the case that we have this setup, then to me the core framework should be best optimised for the one thing that is common to all forums (and varies between important and unimportant for non-forum uses): making the process of being able to share content and discussion easier.

Having AeMe in the core does this, IMO, both the auto embed and gallery parts (assuming using them for attachments), but the calendar and birthdays facilities do not inherently make it easier to share content and discussion.

To me, they're facilitators for social engagement, not content and discussion, so while they are important for some forums, for others they're absolutely unimportant.

Now, you could argue that other things we're doing fall into the same category, in particular the ability to like content, but that to me sits on the border between being content encouraging and social participation. It allows people to indicate they like some content, encourages more of it as a consequence and it allows people to feel they have an outlet for expressing an opinion without necessarily having to post - on those grounds I'd be inclined to make it core rather than through a plugin.


The bottom line is that this is a complex road we travel, we're not going to be able to please everyone all of the time, but I suspect the facility of having things as plugins that can co-exist nicely will really help matters.

1.	I'm not trying to change your mind, am I? :lol: Seriously, though, I do want to get across how I see it, to explain why I'm even suggesting/asking.

Question: what happens to the size of the file before and after with gzip?

I remember someone doing a test to shorten $scripturl to just 'index.php' instead of prepending it with $boardurl, and finding the gzipped difference was only 200 bytes. I wonder if something similar would be the case here.

I also wonder whether it wouldn't be worthwhile stripping \s{2,} from the buffer while we're at it (since bbcode/posted code is not subject to that limitation, as it's injected with nbsp entities during preparse)

I don't think there is one. Packing JS is not normally a JIT type process, it's done in batch and pushed out once done. Even the likes of JSMin and Packer are not designed for JIT and not really in the manner in which Wedge uses them (which is about the closest to JIT I think you're going to get)