Wedge

For me it's OK to stay in core. But with permissions attached.

I'd say if robots are a problem, we could simply attach possibly_robot to that.
OTOH, one of the good points of printpage is that it gets you more chances to have multiple keywords stuffed in it. But I think that Google & co know better when it comes to a topic page - especially with the 'next' and 'previous' (prev?) meta keywords in it to indicate that it's a multi-page topic.
Which I just realized is NOT in Wedge..?! I thought I'd implemented that long ago... :-/But guests are also entitled to viewing printpage if they're not bots...

SMF has it, however it uses it to point to previous/next topic, not pages within a multi-page topic (and I can't remember if that's the correct use or not actually)Yes, currently. Whether that remains the case remains to be seen.Except that it isn't. It's been marked as nofollow for some time, even in SMF, which means search engines are not supposed to consider it for ranking purposes - but they will still frequently index it anyway.

Also note that there are cases where you can screw things up because of the way print page works. For example, try to get the print page of the Aeva topic on SMF, it's likely going to fail hard when it runs out of memory.

The main display staggers it - it pulls one post, processes it, displays it. Print page gets *everything* in one go and then hands it all to the template. For larger topics, doubly so on low-memory configurations, it's going to go splat.

How about this:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/

There's quite a bit more involved than simply using a different stylesheet.

Print page versions have the entire thread on them, not paginated. There are also several changes to the way bbcode is handled, certain tags get disabled, certain other tags have their behaviour modified to suit printing, for example the color bbc is silently disabled, links are changed so that the URL is present.

None of this stuff can be done in CSS.

Harsh. Good luck then.

Although quite a few of those can be fixed with CSS. Color bbc for example could pretty easily be disabled with a !important somewhere in there, and URLs can be appended with pure CSS. The pagination is probably the biggest issue.

This is partly why I want to make it a plugin because I'd actually remove all the extra crap from the parser which would allow some sanity.

Let me explain my beef with this. parse_bbc accepts 4 parameters: the message to parse, whether smileys are enabled, a cache id, and a list of specific tags to parse. (This last one is primarily used for signatures, where you only allow certain bbc in signatures.)

Seems logical, right? Yeah... I thought that, until I realised that the 'are smileys allowed' parameter isn't really a boolean. It has three valid values - true, false, and 'print'. As you can imagine that's not the way to go about things.

Sounds like an idea.

I'm currently bedridden, but I'm probably going to look into the CSS print page way later if you do make it so it's a plugin. Can't hurt to have every way tested, eh? Seems to me to be a plugin even I could do. (Adding a css file shouldn't be too hard, or?)

It's a bit technical given how the printpage stuff works - it's actually embedded directly into the page, not even as a CSS file! (If/when I make it a plugin, I'll rewrite it to use a CSS file anyway)

I still think you're missing the point with chasing the printable CSS version, though. While you could certainly fix a number of the aspects of layout with a printable stylesheet (most notably, hiding the sidebar, de-floating anything else, hiding most of the user side panel, the options and menus, quick reply), you still won't have the ability to have the entire thread in one place, something not permitted in the main code (it used to be an option but IIRC I removed it), plus links still won't be printed, just their link text.

I think at best you'll get something that looks respectable, but will still be a poor imitation of what is really needed.



The big question: do we need it in the core? My gut feeling is actually no.

I say no as well, plugin with perms should be just fine. In SMF I use your print page permission mod to remove guests permission to view it, but for no special reason. I would bet that not too many are concerned whether it is core or not and probably wouldn't miss is it were removed.

I have never once printed a thread in 15ish years using forums. How lame am I?

I've never used print-page to print anything, I have used it a few times to save archive copies of a thread for surreptitiously sending to people.

I vote for making it plugin and have a css print page in core (also if it doesn't handle all the things that print page non-css does)..

I wouldn't bother with the CSS print page in core to be honest. It's just one more thing to bug test on.