Wedge

To implement either would be a major, major rewrite. SMF (and thus Wedge) is already tentatively MVC structured, but it could easily be more thoroughly concrete in that direction (only earlier today, there was a discussion about an idea that might have gone into SMF 3 that I am interested in pursuing that would help in that direction)

SMF's DB layering is primitive, it's designed to basically fudge MySQL queries into PostgreSQL and SQLite, well we removed most of that, but in order for us to viably use a real abstraction layer, the schema needs to be overhauled first, and need to get rid of so many FIND_IN_SET calls for matching :o (Yes, the list of secondary groups a user is in is stored as a comma separated list in the members table directly, just for an off-the-top-of-my-head example)

Yes, it *can*, but I strongly advise against it, because it will flatten any server once it gets remotely busy, no matter how you have it configured.

Option 1: COMET style, long running HTTP kept-alive polls, held open until there's an update... which is efficient right up until you consider that Apache will force a new PHP threadprocess for each connection, which means you're talking a persistent weight of 20MB or so per connection, and it doesn't take many connections before you either hit the oomkiller, or you've exhausted the memory pool for genuine connections.

If you want to go down the road of nginx+PHP-FPM at this point, be aware that most hosts don't support that yet, because it's fundamentally different to how they're set up. Yes, it will cope with thousands of edge connected HTTP connections driven by event handling, and use little memory in handling it, but you lose the ability to properly authenticate to it.


Option 2: AJAX style, regular polling. Let's see, even with 20 users polling every 10 seconds (which is a low number of users and much slower than most of the existing AJAX chat solutions), you still have to run the gamut of Wedge startup in order to authenticate the user, which means you're pulling an awful lot into memory to achieve it and still be efficient.


Before I go any further, let me make it known that on one site I run, I *have* such a system; I wrote it from scratch as a plugin to SimpleDesk (which means it installs without any file edits of its own whatsoever). It's AJAX style, and it's very, very carefully written to be incredibly efficient; it even uses a specially modified version of the SMF API that I wrote for 2.0 to make authentication an order of magnitude cheaper than SSI.php.

IOW, been there, seen it, done it, and it would flatten most low end hosts, even with the lightweight solution I have.

We would have to rewrite every single line in order to no longer be a derivative, but it'll happen in time.

Officially, they are not 'running scared', and officially they do not think that we 'have won', and that officially they wish us good luck for Wedge.

Why do you think it's taken 5 years?

I appreciate the offer being made here, but honestly, I'm not interested in money - all I did here was send a PM, just happened to be one of those right-place-right-time moments.

Yeah, that makes sense. Wasn't sure if it was $options or not, but it makes sense that it isn't where theme options are concerned.

(Though, quite honestly, I'm not sure it's the sort of thing that should be a *theme* option, but that's another story)

Well... save a copy should be defaulted to on, and of display mode, one at a time should be the default now (I'm still not entirely convinced about convo mode, but either one at a time or convo mode is an improvement over all-at-once)

I'd also note that the switch UI was pulled to the main view as a dropdown rather than a toggle button for usability purposes ;)