Wedge | My thoughts
« on February 4th, 2014, 09:07 AM »
Not putting miles on your Ferrari is like not having sex with your Girlfriend so she'll be more desirable to her next Boyfriend
Soft “Feel” | No one likes an angry harsh feeling when they spend a long time somewhere, and the web is no exception. The default theme has a nice mix of green and soft yellows to create a rather calming feeling.
Information you need, at a glance | Sometimes its hard to get all the information you need in one place, the front page does a good job of that with the recent topics.
Thoughts System | Why has this not been implemented before, seriously.
Administration section is inline and the theme is consistent with the rest of the site |
Accessible Administration section | Again the admin section is logically laid out and has menus to easily swap areas of the admin section
Ability to use Gravatar out of the box | Nuff said
Posters details stay with the screen as you scroll down the long posts, this… is… so… useful!!!
Sluggish feel | Sometimes it fees as if the server takes longer than it should, double the time of MyBB (although its still within seconds)
Clicks sometimes don’t register and you have to click again
| Happens a lot with the random home icon that does nothing that I can see, only the text is clickable
Some of the users of the support forum can be quite douchey to new users (and an ex-dev was much like this I noticed)
Yeah, I know it's long.. ;)
I'll pretend to ignore the blaaatant name dropping at the end. :niark:
Technically, it's only the default 'test' homepage, my plan is to offer a dedicated admin settings page where you'll be able to choose what portions you'd like to show in the homepage. (It's already largely implemented in the Home.php file, I just need to add the proper settings, really..! And do something about that translatable intro... :lol:)
It's been implemented in various ways in other systems. Basically, really, it's a nested tweet system. Some seem to prefer shoutboxes, though. It's a different philosophy.
The thought system was originally spawned from 'user texts', you know, the customizable text below your avatar in topic pages. I implemented an input box on the noisen.com header to quickly set it. Then I figured, why not allow people to comment on them..? So I did just that. Made it into its own table, added a hierarchy, etc... In the end, it's grown to something more; a mini-forum, if you will, where the character limit is set at an arbitrary 255 char limit. (Could be more, really...)
That one's SMF, really!
It's quite different from the SMF admin layout, but there are many things I'd still like to move around. I don't have the same opinions as Arantor in this area, and he was in charge of redoing the admin area (his personal hobby?), so when he left, I felt that I owed him nothing in this respect, and that I could go back to something I liked better. The first thing I did was to move several items to the generic settings area. Then I rewrote an obscure and complicated double save function for settings into a unique save function, suddenly allowing me (and anyone) to do anything they want, anywhere, rather than "depending on whether this or that is in this file..." Anyway!
One could say I could go further and add proper Facebook Connect out of the box. Years ago, Pete and I removed OpenID support because we (well, mostly Pete) felt it was only half-baked, and was to be replaced with a better system. He never got around to implementing it, though, and it's really not my priority. But if I had to do a bridge with another IDing system, it'd be Google I think, and then Facebook. Google Credentials is doable, although I've rarely seen in use on other websites. Also, I'd like to change the way external-based signups are considered 'lower citizens' on a forum. There's no reason for this to happen, IMHO. But I take security seriously, so... "Postponed until I have more take to look into it."
In the meantime, if you want OpenID support, you'll have to use ElkArte. (Certainly not bad software; I'd recommend that you try it out.)
Yeah, and that only took, like, a couple of days to implement. And competitors will probably end up adding it, too, and in five minutes only. See, browsers are now catching up and offering a CSS property that does the same. If you look into my code history, you'll see that I actually added that CSS property, and am falling back to my original code (the one that took a couple of days to perfect) if it's not supported (i.e. pretty much everything at the current time.)
Another thing I'm proud of, is infinite scrolling. Only the most recent competitors have it, such as Discourse. As far as I know, no PHP-based competitor has it. This is because it's horribly hard to implement. It's okay if you have static elements to show, but we're talking about user posts that can contain JavaScript (e.g. embeds, etc.), and it forces one to rewrite a LOT of things to make them behave. A nightmare, I'll tell you...
Okay, I'm really, really concerned about that.
On Wedge.org, I currently see a slowdown about every two minutes, because that's when my Github plugin takes action, and I have yet to implement an Ajax version of it that will not slow down my pages. However, that plugin is ONLY active on admin logons, that is to say only I will see these slowdowns.
Now, for the last couple of weeks my server has been a bit inefficient, but I have a feeling that it's improving to normal levels, at least for the last couple of days, so I'm not seeing much of a performance problem.
On my local Windows install, I'm seeing zero slowdowns.
However:
- You pointed out you're having slowdowns,
- Xarcell pointed out (on Github) that he's having slowdowns compared to ElkArte.
Considering that ElkArte does a reasonable job at being faster than SMF (they're also concatenating and minifying CSS, and JS IIRC, although not gzipping it in advance), it's fair to say that they're competing against Wedge rather than SMF when it comes to performance. However, I've been extremely anal about performance in Wedge. Really. It's one of my obsessions. I'm very happy with it, I've managed to save a lot of time on backend page generation (about 30% time improvements overall compared to a few months ago), and frontend pages are extremely fast to load (as little HTML as possible, inline images, scripts all loaded at the end of the page on session starts, etc.), so to me it's a bit baffling that both Xarcell and you are seeing slowdowns, either comparing to ElkArte or MyBB.
To me, the only software that feels really faster than Wedge is FluxBB. They'll always keep the speed crown because they have so few features built-in. It's easier to load quickly, when you're not executing anything... :^^;:
I'd like more feedback on speed, really. Positive or negative. Or maybe unit tests. Some way to find out what's slowing it down for you. Where the bottlenecks are.
Never seen that happen...
Random home icon..? (??)Quote | Happens a lot with the random home icon that does nothing that I can see, only the text is clickable
Some will mostly talk in quick one-liners that may not be very welcoming, but nothing bad AFAIK...
Could be just me I guess.Quote Never seen that happen...
Looking forward to it, I know it can be changed in Home.php but meh I am happy with the info it displays.
Yeah the thing I was mainly getting at was that the menu structure when you are in an admin item pretty much allows you to get anywhere, from anywhere. And most things are logically laid out, although I did lose some items occasionally.
I think it would decrease the barriers to sign up, but would you just want to import the users details to the forum, or would you actually link the details to Facebook / Googles?
Infinite Scrolling?Quote Another thing I'm proud of, is infinite scrolling. Only the most recent competitors have it, such as Discourse. As far as I know, no PHP-based competitor has it. This is because it's horribly hard to implement. It's okay if you have static elements to show, but we're talking about user posts that can contain JavaScript (e.g. embeds, etc.), and it forces one to rewrite a LOT of things to make them behave. A nightmare, I'll tell you...
It's not as bad as SMF (from memory) but I can move my old MyBB forum to a test page tonight if you like, so that you can see what I mean?
I don't think it's to do with something hooking into it, it's just the general feel. In saying that, I think I am the only one that notices because no one has told me different.
I saw some references to Elk and tried finding the link but failed, might try again tonight.
This guy.
1. | Yes, I have yet to install Elk because I don't want to be influenced by competition too much, so I'm only speaking from their feature lists and regular random looks at their commits. |
Imagine for instance a homepage with some large text that welcomes you, as in the 'flat design' trend if you will, and then at the bottom, a list of recent topics, recent commits, or something. If you're a regular on the forum, won't you want to get rid of the large text, and get to the real contents instead...? I know I would. For instance, I'd like for my 'recent topics' tab to get at least 20 entries by default, not 5. Things like that...
You can always find them back with the admin search engine. It's been improved in Wedge, but it's also in SMF.Quote Yeah the thing I was mainly getting at was that the menu structure when you are in an admin item pretty much allows you to get anywhere, from anywhere. And most things are logically laid out, although I did lose some items occasionally.
I'm imagining that I would have checkboxes at signup time, default being checked off, saying something like "Try to find my Facebook friends here" and "Get my user data to fill my profile automatically", or something. If checked off, it ensures Wedge asks Facebook for as few permissions as possible. I know I tend to shun logins when an app asks for more than I'd expect from it. I just want to post something in some specific topic I'm interested in, dummy, not create a full account of my life and spend my days talking everywhere!
Well, I don't know... Just look at Google Images, or Facebook, Twitter, etc.Quote Infinite Scrolling?
http://wedge.org/pub/7704/infinite-scroll/ <-- that's when I started working on the feature. It was brutal... I'm expecting Wedge will be the only SMF fork to ever do that because it requires a lot of jQuery internal knowledge. :P
Also an Elk, if you're planning to do so.
So far, it's just you and Xarcell. But to me, that's 2 above the expected number of complaints.
It's not 'hidden' or anything. There's no policy on wedge.org to prevent from posting links to the competition.
Plus, as I said multiple times, I'm in good terms with them, and if disaster should strike me or Wedge, I'd recommend people switch to ElkArte 10 times over a switch back to SMF.
They also have the ONE feature I want in Wedge but can't be arsed to develop myself or even import into Wedge and credit them for... 'Post from e-mail'. I want that! Of course it requires a cooperating mail server, things like that, but I've always loved that kind of feature, and when I first started using a self-hosted forum back in 2003, that's one of the features I was longing for. But because PHP doesn't support that from the start, it's not possible to do it without bridging with the mail server (which Elk does, although last I heard, that feature was under-tested so it may not work at all.[1])
1. Yes, I have yet to install Elk because I don't want to be influenced by competition too much, so I'm only speaking from their feature lists and regular random looks at their commits.
This guy is just a visual clue that 'Home' is a link to the homepage...Quote This guy.
If you'll look at the HTML for it: there's a span for the icon, and then there's the menu entry that can actually be highlighted. If I included the icon in the menu entry, the currently selected section would have the icon inside the selection style (here at Wedge, it's a greenish background), and it implies that the icons need to be comfortable on *whatever* backgrounds you throw at them, and the Wedge icons (taken from a popular package), while very efficient, don't look as good when shown on a darker background.
Believe me, I've always put a lot of thought into my design decisions.
However, I never considered the possibility of doubling links in the menu. Or, come to think of it, simply add a small click handler to the icons, so that they'll follow the same links as their text entries. Okay, I'll do that... It won't add too many bytes, I guess.
Yeah but I didn't really use SMF as much as I did MyBB, so that's more where I am coming from. Apologies for mentioning SMF-like features that I appreciate ;)
Was more really an observation, nothing too bad. But I thought I would just report my findings. :)
Everyone just referred to it as "Elk", and when I google "Elk" you can imagine what comes up... Pictures of the animals and their associations :P
TBH that is not a feature that would interest me in the slightest. I don't even use it for Wordpress.
I think rather than like the home text that has a menu, maybe make it a separate clickable link that just goes to the SITEURL?
Would be nice, but it's up to you. It just seems like a wasted link set to confuse people in a hurry ;)
I just decided that SMF was the most realistic choice for me because (1) I had a lot of expertise with it, (2) it was the frigging best free software to begin with.
Please do, please do!
Even if I don't reply all topics, especially the 'love Wedge / hate Wedge' topics (which I created more to give me feedback on what I should focus on, keep or remove in Wedge in future versions, and I don't want to start discussions in these topics, so I guess I'll really have to build that 'reply to new topic' feature), I do read all of them.
Yeah... But it's referred to sometimes with its full name, it's just that it's a long name. Actually, that silly name is one of the worst features in their software. (I can talk; I've been regularly unhappy with the 'Wedge' name in the last 3 years, mainly because of my failure to find a proper font for my logo; if I'd chosen 'Weave' as a name, I'd have had the perfect logo, but then not the perfect domain name. The little things, as you say...)Quote Everyone just referred to it as "Elk", and when I google "Elk" you can imagine what comes up... Pictures of the animals and their associations :P
I use it regularly on Github.
It's implemented now. You can look at the JS source code (look for the mm plugin in gz/js/script-*.js, unminify it of course, or just wait until I push to github), it's working fine, and it's using about 30 bytes in the final file, so I guess that acceptable until I come up with a better solution. I had one that saved a couple of bytes but didn't create a proper link tag, and that's against my accessibility policy.Quote I think rather than like the home text that has a menu, maybe make it a separate clickable link that just goes to the SITEURL?
No, no, every single minute spent on fixing something for Wedge noobs is an hour gained on future tech support.