Wedge

Well, in the case of Wedge, the actual subtemplate list is an array as well, such that multiple sub templates can exist.

There are already pages where this happens; on the board index, for example, each item of the info center is a separate template that's added to the sidebar template list.

I don't recall anywhere else I split the templates up, but that's mostly just down to not having gotten round to it.

In other news, I made use of this multiple list facility in WedgeDesk earlier today to add a new item to the end of the unread/unreadreplies page without having to fake it up as a template layer as SimpleDesk had to, so it can definitely be done.

I'm working on it because I learned a very hard and very valuable lesson during SD's development. Namely that if I'm going to spend any time working on a plugin setup, I need a known working plugin first. It's like the chicken and the egg, and I spent an inordinate amount of time last summer, and earlier this year, chasing down bugs that were intermittent and apparently untraceable - because I was looking in the wrong places for things, like looking at the plugin manager when it was a plugin bug and vice versa.

This way, I can build it to not require any edits, and gradually convert it to make use of the newer add-on manager, whereupon I know it's working as it should be, without having to fix a bajillion things and not really knowing what's to blame and what's broken.

Plus it gives me a good way to apply my theory of how add-ons should work in a real and practical way; there aren't many plugins as big and complicated as SimpleDesk is, that integrate as tightly (but cleanly) as SD does to SMF, and believe me when I say it does an insane number of things, some of which I don't think have been done before or since.

For example, it actually modifies the language editor code, so that when you see the list of language files to edit, SD's are at the top and with 'nice' names for each file, not the mashup filename you normally get (and that happened because I was fed up dumping language files into the main languages folder and wanted to keep SD's language files to itself, in a very definite move that echoes how I want Wedge's add-ons to work)


As for the sidebar, I'm going to move all the SD profile sidebar items into the regular sidebar, and be done with it, so the problem goes away.

Re the name, I'm honestly not sure. WedgeDesk seemed natural but I don't worry about saying it many times fast - SimpleDesk pretty much fails that test too.

Mind you, the repo name is wedesk so maybe I'll end up switching it to that... Don't know, not really bothered by it at this stage...

SMF already has it, incidentally, just it's incredibly under-used and of all those who set up package servers, I think vbgamer's site and SimpleDesk were the only ones to do it that served more than one mod at a time through it.

Yeah, the idea is for us to do something more groundbreaking with it, but there is still the problem of actually getting sites added to them in the first place. All the mods that actively work with such repositories have to add them themselves on installation.I actually discussed this sort of thing as being part of the service that SMF Marketplace would offer, by being able to accept client logins for the list of mods served.Far better to do it with user/pass setup, to be honest.*nods* I got the idea of placeholders in a way that seems consistent with what you're suggesting, I just didn't get it to start with ;)Oh, definitely, which is why I've been sort of banging the drum about being able to support paid mods much earlier on in the cycle. From my perspective, I think the number of people able and willing to provide premium resources for an ecosystem is an indication of that ecosystem.

Want premium WP themes and mods? There's no shortage of them at all, even though by their own admission they prefer free (and WP is GPL so free is pretty much a requirement anyway, meaning you pay for support rather than the resource itself). And the network effect pretty much validates the whole premium gig on WP anyway.

The same can't be said for SMF; there are I think 3 sites offering premium themes and 2 offering premium[1] and that to me says there's a problem with the ecosystem.Therein lies the problem. There is a shortage of people who would get the job done, simply because finding people of that calibre is hard enough generally, and even if you do find people of the right calibre, odds are they're not going to have a lot of time to dump into sifting through what other people write.

To be brutally honest, I reviewed dozens and dozens of mods for SMF, and I never approved a great many of them, simply because they weren't up to standard, with a large percentage simply not even working in the first place, let alone reasonably tested.Interesting, and unfortunately I have to say it's a little naive, if well meant. There was a warning on the sm.org download page for *years* that 2.0 was still in development and not meant for a production environment, yet it didn't prevent great numbers of people using it in such, and then complaining about it when it was in use in such. Those people tended to get short shrift from me, though...*nods* I think we'd stick to our rules better than most, especially because of what's happened, but I've learned over time that any rule in place for the regulation of any environment invariably leads to people testing the limits of that rule. Which means if we had a featured mod area of some kind, there would need to be criteria, and that criteria is invariably up for debate, especially if it means either any 'team' member being able to showcase their material there at will, or excluding their material which is equally unfair.[2]

Although I came to regret a great many things that happened during my time with SMF, I'm damned if I'm going to repeat their mistakes, and that's one of the things that I see as a mistake. The phrase at this point is simply, "Who watches the watchers?"

In another related note, there is one issue with people approving mods: who approves them when it's an approver releasing a mod? Another approver?[3]That's always going to be a tricky balance, as I discovered while on the Cust Team. There were a number of people that I upset during my time as a reviewer, because I insisted that they follow the guidelines and they didn't understand why they had to, when as far as they were concerned, they'd done the hard work by writing a mod in the first place, and that was enough, apparently.That's the way I roll. Using a single topic is fine for some mods, it isn't for bigger mods. On the flip side, we need to be very careful about not repeating the... debacle that was the Aeva board on sm.org. For those who don't remember/know, Aeva was temporarily given its own board by the sm.org team, and it wasn't what Nao really wanted or needed, especially when he wasn't made its moderator (which would have solved a great many problems, actually), plus the board was set to post approval. You can only imagine how this didn't solve the problems the team perceived there to be.[4]

What I really like about things like this is simply that they're not huge tasks to implement, meaning that we can actually implement it pretty quickly, and if it turns out that it isn't working that well, we can think about something else. The real success isn't whether something is a success, but how quickly you can move on through failures.I have the feeling that the reality will not coincide with the theory here. The theory is that Wedge will be more tech-user oriented, but the reality is that if it's good, and usable, people will use it. Even though there is the tech-orientation mindset in there, the fact is we are making it more usable generally, which is going to lower the barrier to entry whatever else happens.

Which means that as much as we might notionally have this minimum tech knowledge level to cope with, the reality is less clear cut, and we are going to end up fielding non technical users' questions and problems, which includes mod support.

You also ask probably the most important question at the end there. Even if they could, would they? The answer is probably not. sm.org is the evidence here: of the people who offer support on mods, those providing support tend to be in the category of offering support on well documented/well known problems, or general functionality issues - not on debugging and cases that actually need support. Sure, there were and are a few people that do actually do support on mods that is a bit more than just helping users who don't bother to read support materials like the mod's page or FAQ, but they're so few and far between it's unreal.[5]No worries :) Hope you slept well.*nods* This is the approach I was wondering about, really. Apple and Google have shown that it is viable enough.

But at the same time you do get abuses there, where people publish free, limited versions of apps and then proceed to sell the paid, less crippled/less irritating versions. It's not so bad for Apple where they actually sanity check stuff before it enters the marketplace though.

I guess I'm looking for some way to provide all the good stuff (choice for users, encouragement for premium resources) without all the bad (abuse).

Before anyone starts accusations of profiteering out of a platform, there is a valid point to be made: in any ecosystem, market forces do apply. If a paid mod is sufficiently desirable, there's enough demand that supply will inevitably pick up for it - if WedgeDesk gets exceptionally popular while paid, I would imagine that a free competitor would emerge for it, and that's how it's supposed to work.

The problem was that there was this overriding mentality at sm.org that if one exists, that's good enough, even if it isn't necessarily the best way to do it. But if there is encouragement to build things that work, and work really well, the problem does actually go away for the most part, because normally the only reason for alternatives to crop up is if something actually doesn't work that well to start with.

Consider: for years, Ad Management was the ad mod to use. After a while, SimpleAds turned up and took away a decent number of users, because it didn't have the same barriers to entry as Ad Management did - then Ad Management came back and upped its game. Competition is, really, a wonderful thing for spurring on development.

1.	Well, it depends if you call 'paid' premium or not. One of them is premium, one of them is paid and so dearly wanting to be premium.
2.	Team members being able to feature their own work at will devalues the rest of the material featured, and team members not being able to feature their work limits their motivation to write that quality of material.
3.	There is more than one mod of mine that I ended up approving because no-one else would. Not because there was anything wrong, but simply because no-one actually reviewed them.
4.	The idea was that it would tone down the attitude that was building, except that it didn't because the team didn't care about it much, to the point where they considered it mostly a dumping ground. Half the time no-one seemed that interested in approving posts in that board, the other half the time, they never bothered to deal with inflammatory posts even when they approved them.
5.	Look for posts by people like feline, if you're wondering what I'm getting at, where the support isn't just answering questions that have already been asked/answered before, but actual bug hunting and how to perform improvements.

Just heading off topic briefly, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that WD would probably want its own site going forward, so that even if I do a premium site, it will probably be its own thing anyway, which makes sense.

Tell you one thing I haven't seen done before that might be worth trying: just as DS and BlocWeb do/have done theme clubs, I'm tempted to see how well a mod club works out in the future, but yeah, I am sensing that premium mods should be done on their own site (heck, arantormods.com might actually reopen then!)

Fairly sure you did, but where I've been working on WedgeDesk, it's brought all that stuff up again, especially as WD is almost certainly going to be paid at this point.[1]

And that I'm going to be writing a lot of mods and I need some idea of how best people are going to want support, since I'm increasingly inclined to think that a single topic isn't really enough.[2]That's the big thing for me, and it's why I'm contemplating whether WedgeDesk will end up with its own site or not.

I'm also not 100% sure whether I want to do entirely free mods or not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to go down the road of our friend and do free mods whose sole existence is to promote paid mods, but at the same time, I am going to be spending a lot of time writing things that are by definition not for everyone, and I'm not entirely sure it's fair on everyone else if I do that without encouraging some kind of contribution back.

Yes, I will be writing a lot of free mods, that can live here or wherever, but at the same time, I am going to be writing bigger mods that will require support resources and so on, that will likely be out of scope for what can be here, especially since I'm not going to be too happy trying to support everything at once.

Like I've said before, I'm quite happy to make mods for free and give them away but then there's the support aspect to contend with, and people love having free stuff and then expecting pro quality support on top, and I simply will not have enough time to cope with everything if I'm still developing for Wedge itself at that point, hence the money filter to filter out those who are genuinely serious about wanting what they want, enough to put their hands in their pockets for it.

The last thing I want to do is write a ton of mods, then proceed to burn out through not wanting to deal with all the support crap that inevitably goes with it, which then comes back into support resources being there for people ahead of time, which may or may not be supported in Aeva/Wedge Media and thus requiring custom coding anyway, or a custom site to deal with it all.

1.	Having looked at all the conversion work plus bugfixes plus new features, plus the fact I'm going to be the only one supporting it, anyway.
2.	Unless it's threaded, but that's another road to travel entirely.

No worries :) It's a big week for me too with the new plugin manager code...

Series 6 is many things, but not targeted towards kids.Alex Kingston is older than Matt Smith, but the writing is a bit odd, certainly.Oh yes there was. Especially DT and Martha.


Remember also that it can't be too OTT in terms of adult stuff given its timing, makes it quite hard to be 'for adults' as well as 'for kids', and I think seasons 5 and 6 have been quite well balanced in that respect (season 5 especially, IMO)

There is a distinct increase in chance it will fail, in one of two ways.

PHP has its own time limit, of course, but there is also a secondary performance limiter in regexp which is the backtrack limit. For those not so hot on regexp, every time the engine steps through an expression that it's started to match (first character matches, second character matches, third character doesn't, for example), it has to go back to where it started to re-evaluate the next character, which is a backtrack.

There is a limit on the number of backtracks allowed in a single overall call to the preg_ functions, and it's usually pretty high (I seem to recall the default being 100k or so), but when you get recursive calls, particularly if the input is designed so it would quite badly end up backtracking as many times as possible (this is known as the pathological case, or the grounds for ReDoS), it starts to hit that limit.