Wedge

Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: Arantor on November 2nd, 2011, 04:13 PM

Title: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on November 2nd, 2011, 04:13 PM

This is something that's been bugging me for a while. The user area of a given poster is not exactly customisable. Yes, you can style it, but you can't reorder it or add new items into it at present.

Part of me thinks we could get around it by having a list of items that pertains to the given user and then having a list of what would amount to subsubtemplates to render the content, but that feels hackish. To be fair though, so does any of the other methods I've thought about since template-skeleton doesn't quite cover the case here (though I have little doubt it could be made to do so)

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on November 25th, 2011, 04:47 PM

Bump. Quite a few plugins will depend on this.

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on November 25th, 2011, 07:31 PM

Well, yes I suppose we could introduce mini-skeletons for repetitive items like posts and userboxes but good bye performance. Or we'd have to write a mini rendering system for them as well.

Posted: November 25th, 2011, 07:28 PM

It would be doable I suppose if we did it only for posts. Then in this mini skeleton we add the userbox blocks. At rendering time we provide the contents for each block and they're shown depending on the context. Eg we hide the user box if in the profile area.

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on November 25th, 2011, 07:42 PM

And I'd rather not screw performance up...

No, I don't think the skeleton approach is the right one for this. The problem isn't that building the array of the skeleton is intensive, because it isn't - it's at worst a different array and function call per post, but I don't feel it's the way to go.

What is closest to how we do things is to build the list of items in $context, which will be a list of items in memberContext for each user (provided it's populated by lMD and lMC, it's in memberContext) then the template can just iterate through it.

It's still ugly but it's not the performance killer it could be.

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on November 25th, 2011, 08:09 PM

But it's harder to customize this way.

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on November 25th, 2011, 09:07 PM

Depends what you're trying to do, really, I was more interested in allowing plugins to cleanly extend or alter the list of items, rather than customising it, but appropriate CSS would make a lot of difference.

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on November 25th, 2011, 10:04 PM

Apart from that, I'm really, really interested in having a common layout for all places in Wedge where we show posts (including PMs)... I thought we could have the best of both worlds... :P

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on November 25th, 2011, 10:22 PM

Here's the thing. There isn't a common layout at present, and I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.

Right now the post and PM layout is similar, but not identical (even in terms of the icons shown etc., e.g. the send PM icon and IP address aren't shown), but all the other places where posts are shown (notably search, recent, unread, unreadreplies) do not have much common ground at all...

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on November 25th, 2011, 11:06 PM

But those you mention are similar between them ;)

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on November 26th, 2011, 01:42 AM

Post and PM are similar, search is pretty unique, recent/unread/unreplies are all similar but they're not similar to search or posts/PMs, and I don't think they should be.

I'm not sure that putting in the user info would make a lot of positive difference in the search or any of the other areas (other than PM)

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on November 26th, 2011, 08:55 AM

I just think the post layouts across the various forum features might benefit being streamlined. And your original idea would have been the opportunity to do it.

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on December 7th, 2011, 10:06 AM

OK, new idea.

Inside prepareDisplayContext, the poster's details are pulled from memberContext. What if, instead of that, we did something smarter?

We already have a list of the people who have posted in a topic. Why not build - in memberContext or somewhere else - an array of the stuff we're going to display for them?

Instead of just throwing a reference to the relevant user's memberContext, we create an array for that user (to be referenced in the return from pDC) which has the list of items to be displayed, and in the order to display them.

The markup is already a series of li with classes, e.g. li.membergroup, we just create that in the array as the key, with the li contents as the array contents, then we can just render it consistently, and plugins can reorder it or insert things where they like with array_insert, provided that it's accessible via a hook (which there's no reason why it wouldn't be, hell, I see no reason why this wouldn't be done before the main post-getting query is done, so it would be done before display_main is called)

How does that sound?

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on December 7th, 2011, 03:54 PM

Do you think it's gonna be noticeably faster?

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on December 7th, 2011, 04:03 PM

Faster than what? Building a separate array instead of calling memberContext? I wasn't planning on doing that just yet, more just leaving lMD and lMC alone and just yanking out the details needed into an array to be used by the template. It would actually be marginally slower than the current solution, with the exception that it's actually much more flexible and wouldn't require any extra hooks to be set up.

Though that would pave the way for overhauling lMD and lMC in the future, of course. I really should sit down one of these days and figure out if all the stuff in lMC is ever used generally or just in the profile area (and if there's stuff only used in the profile, perhaps it should be broken out and put into the profile area)

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on December 7th, 2011, 04:50 PM

I think I'll let you think about it because I haven't touched the Display code much these last few months and I feel totally unable to help here... :-/

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Arantor on December 7th, 2011, 04:54 PM

This can be done with minimal change to anything outside the Display code (for now) and also has no impact on the postbit in PMs, if done how I think it could be done. Of course, PMs would likely be updated to include similar code, then lMC itself could be overhauled in the future - but that's not something that has to happen immediately.

Title: Re: Extending the postbit/poster info
Post by: Nao on December 7th, 2011, 05:55 PM

If it's not too much of an overhaul then I have no qualms[1] with it being done... Anything that suits you ;)

1.	Ah! First time I'm using that word.