I haven't had chance to try it but it's certainly something that needs investigation. You know, you could always try writing a plugin :whistle:
I don't know, I would first like to hone my skills on OOP... I have a feeling that I need to fully grasp the meaning of cooperation between different elements of a program, before I even consider doing a plugin. Aeva Media was kind of a hard task to manage -- not because of the technicalities of a SMF add-on (Dragooon managed most of it really), but because it required thinking in two ways: the SMF way of doing things, and my way of doing things. With Wedge, the problem is no longer there because I'm doing things my way (and they're close enough to your way that we don't often get dragged into endless discussions about whether something should be done this or that way), but I need to have a feel of how to *allow* others to plug into my mind and my way of doing things -- and I think it's necessary for me to broaden my technique for that.
On a very, very slightly related topic, but it's something I wanted to discuss anyway and I couldn't bother to open a new topic... I finally watched Atlas Shrugged this morning. The movie. I had an interest in Ayn Rand's works because I'm very much interested in null-A logic, which has arguably (and thankfully) nothing to do with objectivism, but she was into null-A as well, so I thought maybe she had something interesting to say. I was not utterly convinced by The Fountainhead, as I found the main character to be mostly selfish and actually too far removed from the contributions to society that he's supposed to be making -- I'm not sure that ambition plays a huge role in your life after you're past your 20/30's. I know it's not in my book right now. But I still liked the idea of a philosophy of doing your own thing and not letting others get in the way. However, with Atlas Shrugged, I think I've finally understood what it's all about... It's an American thing.
From what I understand, Republicans and Democrats are not exactly the same as Right and Left wings in Europe. It's mostly a federal thing, so Republicans have 'laissez-faire', and Democrats represent the government as a means to control wealth in the US, in a way that could lead them to be accused of communism, or as they like to say, socialism. Atlas Shrugged, at least the movie, shows this in a way that reminded me of the current economy crisis in Europe: the wealthier European states, like France and Germany, don't want to 'chip in' for Greece. So, in that respect, we actually have a European leadership that chose the 'Democrat' way of doing things, while the people wants 'laissez-faire'. There's a similar trend in Belgium where the Flemish half of the country doesn't want to pay for the failing economy of the French speaking part -- even though a century ago, the French speaking Belgians were doing the exact same thing for their weak Flemish neighbors.
All in all -- I have a feeling that this is what it's about: when you ask someone to help someone else who's been less lucky, are you being charitable or selfish? It's interesting that in the movie, the 'good guys' are the ones who, as they clearly say themselves, 'are only interested in making money'. I'm not falling for that. The Reardon guy is clearly a geek who only has interest in success and discovery, not in getting paid for that. Now it'd be interesting to see how much that applies to financial institutions... They don't really create things, they only bet on other people's success or failure. That's not innovation to me. I'm not exactly sure why I should be supporting them...
Well, just wanna say that I'm not falling for either side of the issue, but at least I have a better understanding of the divide between Americans (and, let's say it, Europeans now.)
And on my current matters: what are we demonstrating by doing what we're doing? We're not doing it for money, we're not doing it for glory... We're doing it because we feel it has to be done. Because we want to innovate in our field. How would we react if we ended up making Wedge a huge success, and someone demanded of us that we be 'fair' to the competition or something? I don't know, because I think I'm being fair right now -- I'm certainly not trying to make money off anyone, or take market shares, or anything like that.
I think that's it... I think that innovation is not systematically something that should be monetized for the sake of being monetized. What one wants is to keep living doing something that makes them happy. This requires money, so often the two gets mixed together, but it doesn't have to. I think that's probably one of the big flaws in objectivism as I'm seeing it. Unless, of course, I totally misunderstood the concept...
:^^;:*nods* This is also why I'm slack about updating my plugins until things settle down. I still, as it happens, have one plugin that uses loadBlock() from before wetem even existed.
Could be worse... Could be loadSubTemplate()
:PThat's workable. The thing is, whenever doing anything like this, two sets of circumstances need to be borne in mind: firstly, how Wedge itself uses these, and secondly how plugins and themes will use it (but mostly plugins).
Wedge doesn't use it that much. I think there are only a couple of places where multiple target layers are provided (probably when it comes to the menus, which are added to the 'top' layer?). Still, it makes sense to allow plugin authors to make sure their data is shown. I'll give you a quick example: let's say I want to show data in the sidebar at all times. However, Wedge doesn't guarantee me that I'll be able to access the sidebar at all times (another plugin may want to delete it to make room for something else), so I may want to give up on most data I'm showing, but if there's something particularly critical to show, I could just as well create my own layer inside the footer or something, NOT fill it with anything, and only provide it as a fallback for my critical data. Wedge won't budge if it doesn't find any code associated to layers you create. (Just check out Warm's recent indenazi changes -- I added a fake <indent> layer to cancel any indentation changes made by its parent layer. I think it's pretty neat.)
That's one thing among others...
Of course, we could also do it differently, like, instead of providing 'sidebar,fallback', the plugin author could use '!sidebar' or something, where the '!' would be seen by Wedge as a sign that the layer needs to be created if it's not there. It would force me to record all traces of previously deleted layers, though, but it's doable.
Wedge's use is almost entirely just dropping complete lists of templates into layers, but plugins may well want to insert individual things into layers, may want fallbacks, may want to do other things. To be honest, if I'm looking to insert into the sidebar and falling back to the default layer, I really won't want to do it like that, because the styling will be all wrong.
I'm not sure about that. You could very well prepare for this particular case by adding some CSS to adapt the styling for your data inside the fallback layer.
Consider any of the sidebar blocks that we have currently. Would they look right, style-wise, if simply dropped into the default layer? A few might get away with it but generally it'll look bad.
I still have plans to make the sidebar look good horizontally...
:P I need to turn the blocks into inline-blocks for that.
Yeah, it's something to bear in mind. However, while there is little connection, it's going to be called together and used together ultimately, so there's little point in splitting it.
The main point is having all important objects into their own file, for easing editing. Some class files are only called from within one point in the source code (such as Class-CSS or Class-SFTP), so we might argue that they should be stored in the same file... (Well, they're not ALWAYS loaded though, so it's best to keep them apart, sorry for the poor analogy.)
