Wedge

Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: pols1337 on April 30th, 2012, 04:24 AM

Title: Basic Questions
Post by: pols1337 on April 30th, 2012, 04:24 AM
Hi,

It looks like you guys are doing a great thing with Wedge.  I have a couple of basic, perhaps stupid questions:

1.  If a person desires to use Wedge, would they first need to install SMF, and then install Wedge on top?  Or would Wedge be a stand-alone forum software? 

2.  I read in the FAQ's that you all were going to include a lot of powerful features, like Calendar and Blog as part of the system.  I agree with your analogy of MS Word.  Would a frontpage (like "TinyPortal") be potentially included? 

3.  Lastly, how easy would it be for a third-party gallery system (like say, "Coppermine Photo Gallery") to create a bridge to you? 

pols1337
Title: Re: Basic Questions
Post by: ethankcvds on April 30th, 2012, 04:49 AM
Quote from pols1337 on April 30th, 2012, 04:24 AM
1.  If a person desires to use Wedge, would they first need to install SMF, and then install Wedge on top?  Or would Wedge be a stand-alone forum software?
Stand-alone.
Quote from pols1337 on April 30th, 2012, 04:24 AM
2.  I read in the FAQ's that you all were going to include a lot of powerful features, like Calendar and Blog as part of the system.  I agree with your analogy of MS Word.  Would a frontpage (like "TinyPortal") be potentially included?
Calender has actually been removed from the Wedge, though it is going to be part of a plugin.
Quote from pols1337 on April 30th, 2012, 04:24 AM
3.  Lastly, how easy would it be for a third-party gallery system (like say, "Coppermine Photo Gallery") to create a bridge to you?
Um Wedge includes Aeva Media so I don't really see a need for a bridge to an other gallery system.
Title: Re: Basic Questions
Post by: live627 on April 30th, 2012, 06:20 AM
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1.  If a person desires to use Wedge, would they first need to install SMF, and then install Wedge on top?  Or would Wedge be a stand-alone forum software?
No, it will be independent of SMF, as already mentioned above. You will be able to import most or all of your SMF data, depending on which mods you have installed.
Quote
2.  I read in the FAQ's that you all were going to include a lot of powerful features, like Calendar and Blog as part of the system.
You'll be able to specify certain boards to be blogs. For a live example, see the FAQ (which you already saw) and the development blog here.
Quote
Would a frontpage (like "TinyPortal") be potentially included?
There is a home page that is not the board index in Wedge by default. Granted, the one sported here is slightly customised.

(Side note: Nao, I can't use the quote splitter. It appears to be broken with an undefined index.)
Title: Re: Basic Questions
Post by: Arantor on April 30th, 2012, 02:39 PM
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2.  I read in the FAQ's that you all were going to include a lot of powerful features, like Calendar and Blog as part of the system.  I agree with your analogy of MS Word.  Would a frontpage (like "TinyPortal") be potentially included?
Just to provide a bit detail.

The calendar is a plugin in its own right, it's not part of one, it is one. I also made birthday support (sending birthday emails, upcoming birthdays on the board index) a separate plugin, meaning that you can have birthday greetings without the weight of the full calendar, or you can have both, both are specifically designed to interoperate cleanly.

It depends what you mean by 'portal', also. A front page is really only a small part of what the portals offer. There is a front page in Wedge but it's very minimalist and there are no editing/configuration facilities for it at this time, and there is a sidebar by default in Wedge - again, there are no editing or configuration facilities for them. It is not clear at this time whether we will make these things more configurable by default or not, but I suspect we won't put it in the core as it seems to work well enough for most people.
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3.  Lastly, how easy would it be for a third-party gallery system (like say, "Coppermine Photo Gallery") to create a bridge to you?
As already mentioned, Aeva Media is included by default, however it would be no more difficult than it would be for SMF, and in some ways quite a bit easier. The biggest problem is including the style from Wedge because Wedge doesn't use standard CSS files but LESS-type syntax which it auto-compiles, minifies and optionally compresses for better performance, but it really depends on what you're trying to do as to whether this is a good idea or not.

We may in the future look at an importer from Coppermine into Wedge.
Title: Re: Basic Questions
Post by: Nao on May 1st, 2012, 09:37 AM
Quote from live627 on April 30th, 2012, 06:20 AM
(Side note: Nao, I can't use the quote splitter. It appears to be broken with an undefined index.)
Fixed, thanks.
It was due to the object rewrite for the editor -- I didn't bother to save this.opt but I didn't remember that splitQuote was trying to access opt from the outside. I should probably turn closed/protect into global vars... It's not like I'm actually going to use these names for anything else...
Posted: May 1st, 2012, 09:27 AM
Quote from Nao on May 1st, 2012, 09:27 AM
It was due to the object rewrite for the editor -- I didn't bother to save this.opt but I didn't remember that splitQuote was trying to access opt from the outside. I should probably turn closed/protect into global vars...
Done :)
Title: Re: Basic Questions
Post by: Nao on May 1st, 2012, 09:43 AM
Quote from Arantor on April 30th, 2012, 02:39 PM
As already mentioned, Aeva Media is included by default, however it would be no more difficult than it would be for SMF, and in some ways quite a bit easier. The biggest problem is including the style from Wedge because Wedge doesn't use standard CSS files but LESS-type syntax which it auto-compiles, minifies and optionally compresses for better performance, but it really depends on what you're trying to do as to whether this is a good idea or not.
Anyone's still free to use regular CSS files, even in Wedge if you use the classic style throughout the entire file. Or you can simply include a normal CSS file from an external source and it'll be included as is, without any work...

BTW, WeCSS is more in the SASS syntax than LESS. LESS is closer to SCSS which is basically CSS with nesting. I never liked the brackets so much so I naturally went for a SASS syntax, although SCSS/LESS per se are 'supported' if not included alongside the *main* skin CSS file.

I looked into LESS yesterday, BTW... It would seem that during the last year, they added a few interesting innovations like the 'when' keyword. I don't know how they'd be useful in a regular environment thought, but they've certainly been as innovative in the CSS preprocessor field as I've been myself -- only, I don't have time to work on WeCSS more and advertise my new features anyway :P
Title: Re: Basic Questions
Post by: Arantor on May 1st, 2012, 01:13 PM
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Anyone's still free to use regular CSS files, even in Wedge if you use the classic style throughout the entire file. Or you can simply include a normal CSS file from an external source and it'll be included as is, without any work...
That wasn't what I meant, I meant going the other way, to get the Wedge style used in the external gallery.

The problem with LESS itself is that it's actually quite easy to use in a crude way but hard to do anything particularly slick with it; you can include *.less files directly and have them processed via client side JavaScript so in that respect it's easy to use, but it's quite hard comparatively to get it compiled and sent to the client. Having had to investigate this recently for a separate project, it made me appreciate WeCSS a lot more.