Wedge

Some interesting thoughts there.

In absence of anything else, the package manager means mod authors have to do direct edits to achieve things, rather than making use of facilities available. The main consequence of this is mods doing template edits which cause support issues because they then don't appear on some custom themes, or at least not the way they were intended. Adding to that, any theme that does do anything creative invariably fails, which is why so many themes are basically Curve knock-offs as opposed to anything more daring. (Yes, there were designers who do more daring things, but the vast bulk of the time the theme is just recoloured.)

And while there are some huge mods out there (Nao and Dragooon's Aeva Media, SimpleDesk by me and a couple of others, plus the portal mods), the vast bulk of mods are not that huge. There are mods now that simply remove the XHTML and RSS links from the footer, for example.You wonder if we're falling into the trap of "solving the wrong problem" as I tend to call it... well, the core reasons are pretty much as above. I know that's one of the reasons Bloc was so adamantly doing his own thing, but even there if you look at his custom themes (even his paid ones), they're still generally not that different, because he knows the reality of how many mods don't work on custom themes, and the support boards are full of it.

The lack of premium ecosystem for SMF also tells me there's a problem. There are currently two sites that I'm aware of, that provide paid-for themes (Bloc's site does not any longer). For a platform as entrenched as SMF is, there should really be more by now, but the fact is that there's no incentive for premium designers to design for SMF. Couple that with the fact that most people seem quite happy with vague recolourings with their own logo (which often doesn't really fit), and you begin to realise that the standard state of play is to run with what there is, rather than doing anything new.

As for mods, the situation there is marginally healthier, indicating that people generally would rather have new features than themes (at least, there is more effort put into mods than there is in themes, in general)

For example, just glance through the last submitted mods to the mod site:
* adding a user's birthday to their profile summary (in addition to the date which is there)
* specifying an alternative email address for outgoing mail, so that the admin's email isn't used for notifications
* a bugfix for the IE8 jumping text box problem, because obviously that couldn't have been added to 1.1.14/1.1.15 or similar
* two different mods for adding the Google +1 button, one for per-topic, one for per-post
* a nice FAQ mod
* a mod to replace the stats area at the bottom of the board index with a jQuery-based tab solution (which means adding jQuery, and will fail on any other theme/mod that already added jQuery)
* a mod to add several symbols as editor buttons (like 1/2, 1/4)
* putting the page number in the title of the page

As you can see, there's a couple of more complex mods, but for the most part there's nothing really that complicated or large in there. Over the three months I was on the Cust team, reviewing mods, the vast bulk of what came in were certainly in the 'small tweaks' category.


I would note that I have spoken to various theme and mod authors over the last two years and I'm hearing corroborating comments on the above. It boils down to the fact that there aren't the facilities to do most things without template changes, and if there were less template changes required, designers stand more chance of doing things that aren't just recolourings. It'll still happen, of course, but by removing one of the barriers that causes it, it should be possible for theme authors to do more interesting things, and by our approach of disallowing file edits from the add-on manager, modders will have to do things through hooks and other established methods - which means they won't be faced with having to do template edits.

That means if a particular mod and a particular theme don't play nicely, it's not related to the systemic issues currently in SMF and its environment, but it's that the theme does something the mod didn't expect, or vice versa - but it means that it can be dealt with on an individual basis. (Even WP has issues in this direction, I would note)

FWIW, Notepad++ offers 1, 2, some of 3 (there's a popup display for the selection of tabs, much like Alt-Tab does but no jump-to-specific-tab-by-number), 4, 5 if you want, not sure about 6, 7 - well, it doesn't fail on 60MB SQL dumps but it doesn't like it much, 9, 11 and 12.

It's not the uber-IDE but I've found it to be a very nice and capable tool, I certainly haven't found it wanting - except possibly for lack of an SVN plugin that doesn't require the SVN command line tools.

Yup. Much as I hate to keep drawing parallels, it doesn't seem to hurt WordPress. Their updates do just that, though their update bulletin also lists the files that have changed, so you can do comparisons if you want.That's the plan.Define 'collide'. The whole point is that collisions should be minimised - packages should be able to use the same hooks and operate reasonably independently of each other, at least in theory. What I suspect will be the case is mods end up tripping over themselves where one author hasn't bothered to check that a table is already joined or ends up aliasing a table with an existing alias. Unfortunately we can only go so far in protecting against that...

Yes, plus the hooks that a given mod provides.You mean like SMF's 1.1.13 -> 1.1.14 patches? Probably not. (WordPress doesn't and their mods don't exactly do version checking either.)

The XML already has the version and name (which it requires), and provides space for the author and the author's site, but rather avoid putting call-home links like that in the package.

While I don't want to limit people making package servers if they want, I am slightly hesitant to encourage the world and his dog to make one, which is principally the problem I see with the Cydia model, you'd end up with mods so fragmented rather than sane distribution methods.

The XML having a GUID and version number means it has some concept of self-awareness (i.e. I am <big long identifier that's unique to me>) and that can be used to query the servers that a given install is about. I'm not averse to a package being able to indicate package servers though.

(And, at the end of all this, I get to remove an SMF table, yay!)

We already have had those posts as it is... and I value the right of others to speak their minds, too much to just use the delete button even if my only response would be to tell them where to... y'know... stick it.

I appreciate that people are excited. I appreciate that people want to see what we've done. But keep telling us this... that's not encouraging. There is one person in particular who has really, really pissed me off with this. It was said today that we *hope* to get a really usable version out by Christmas, which is cool. Said person simply commented to the effect of 'is it new year yet?'

Most people here probably don't appreciate why I'm so pissed at this attitude. It's simple: most of the people who display such attitude do not give a flying fuck that we've had to spend literally years programming PHP to get to the level we're at. They don't care that we spend many hours designing, implementing, refining what we do. They just want the end result, and bollocks to the thousands of hours that will have to be put in to get there, or the thousands of hours already contributed in learning the existing code base.

That's why I'm so pissed about it: the people who are genuinely excited and not shouting from the rooftops, these people appreciate how much hard work goes in, and when it emerges the fanfare is sincere. But a lot of the people clamouring for stuff aren't doing so because they accept it, they're doing so because they want what they want, and that includes more stuff for free without them having to do any work or pay anyone to get it.

What happens, then, if the same plugin is in two different repositories? Which one should be used? Should I have to track where it's come from? What happens if you install it manually (which is possible), how should it phone home then?

I have already spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, I'd already long considered Cydia style too - but because you're getting it via the store in the first place, there is a mechanism for tracking from its source.

It still doesn't solve the issue of paid repositories, either.

And I'm less interested in mooching off other systems and more about implementing our own, unique and interesting ideas.