Author Topic: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.  (Read 450377 times)

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Offline Arantor

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Not that I'm aware of, and if it were mentioned, I doubt the thread would be allowed to remain there that long.
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Offline DirtRider

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Yeah I did have a scan around and did not see anything this is why I was wondering about it  :sifflote: :mdr:
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Offline hartiberlin

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What about a Wordpress integration ?

Well, if you could make it work, so that it will work with the same user database as Wordpress
uses it, then it would be perfect...!

So one could use Wordpress theme templates and use Wordpress as the Portal for it and use your
fork as the forum of it !

That would be a great solution, as I just love Wordpress and the easy setup and plugin
structure !

Or just build it as a plugin for Wordpress !

I am now also building many sites with Wordpress and just love it...

Regards, Stefan.

Offline Arantor

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There are absolutely no plans to do a WP integration.

If we thought WP was the ideal basis, we'd have started from a fork of that, but 1) it's GPL and GPL is an evil licence, and 2) it's code is abysmal. I'd rather start from nothing than that.

Seriously, the plan is to make the fork more powerful, have some portal features, maybe some blog type features in there, not sure yet on that one, but hell no to WP.

Someone else wants to do the legwork in bridging, more power to them, but I personally will not lift a finger towards it.
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Offline MAVE

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I am curious, wish you strength and success  :cool:

Offline Nao/Gilles

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If we thought WP was the ideal basis, we'd have started from a fork of that, but 1) it's GPL and GPL is an evil licence, and 2) it's code is abysmal. I'd rather start from nothing than that.
+1 on both.
Quote
Seriously, the plan is to make the fork more powerful, have some portal features, maybe some blog type features in there, not sure yet on that one, but hell no to WP.
I'm definitely adding as many blogging features from Noisen as I can...
Of course, I'm already having enough trouble adding built-in PrettyURLs support as is. Eheh. (Problem isn't the base code, but the subdomain stuff. It's really hard to rewrite it in a way that works everywhere. I'm already glad I managed to get rid of all of the .htaccess crap!)
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Offline hartiberlin

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I see,
I did not know about the license problems and the code base in Wordpress,
but I just love the easy setups and the hundreds of useful plugins that update themself easily
with Wordpress..

It is all just so much easier with Wordpress and I heard that there are
now also some good forum plugins out, but did not look yet into them....


Anyway, if your SMF fork will be better and will have more features than SMF 2.0 Gold,
it will be very much appreciated...

I am currently using SMF/PortaMX and it should
be possible to move to your fork then easily, otherwise, if it is too complicated and
the few Mods I use will not work on your fork, I would rather stay on the normal
SMF/PortaMX.

At least a SEO (SimpleSEF), Admod, sitemap mod and download plugin and portal function
should be availabe and of course a great gallery feature.

Also cool would be, if there would be any template editor supporting it as
Artisteer or something simular, so it would be a breeze to design its own template.

If you can do this, surely many SMF users would change to your fork.

It just must be easy to move to your system without loosing too many plugins and
getting better integrated features, that don´t need plugins that might be incompatible with
templates, etc...
maybe you can get a few MOD writers onto your boards, so if your fork comes
out, then also some of these MODs will be available for your fork.

Looking forward to your releases.
Regards, Stefan.

Offline Arantor

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Anyway, if your SMF fork will be better and will have more features than SMF 2.0 Gold,
it will be very much appreciated...
10k lines less crap in the base, plenty more features.
Quote
I am currently using SMF/PortaMX and it should
be possible to move to your fork then easily, otherwise, if it is too complicated and
the few Mods I use will not work on your fork, I would rather stay on the normal
SMF/PortaMX.
Moving the base should be easy. Not so sure about PortaMX since we haven't decided how far a portal in the core will go yet.
Quote
At least a SEO (SimpleSEF)
NO. There will be no support for SimpleSEF at all from us. Besides, there's pretty URLs support in the core which is similar. Oh, and it does NOTHING for SEO. I wish people would stop labouring this myth.
Quote
Admod,
We might build this in, not sure, we might roll it into the portal since really it's very similar functionality to just a specific type of block.
Quote
sitemap mod
Not in the core, I suspect. Does little for SEO in a forum. However, there is a benefit to putting it in the core, that mods which come along might be encouraged to add their stuff in there too.
Quote
download plugin
Use AeMe's facilities for that. No support is planned for vbgamer's mod and I seriously do not see him making the (large) number of changes to it. Besides, I have no intention of helping him do anything for the fork.
Quote
Also cool would be, if there would be any template editor supporting it as
Artisteer or something simular, so it would be a breeze to design its own template.
Don't want much, do you? Note that, again, we're not building this for you. We're building it for US, and just being nice enough to share.
Quote
It just must be easy to move to your system without loosing too many plugins
I can guarantee almost no SMF mod will work. Just what I'm working on right now will break any mod that adds a new action for example. The whole point is to stop trying to continue with the methodology of SMF itself, because that road lies madness. No more file editing as far as possible, minimal amounts of theme edits to get things working etc.

Ditto for themes.

Oh, and when you realise that you have the second most prolific mod writer (second only to Karl Benson in terms of numbers) and the author of the long-time most popular SMF mod, both of whom have single handedly written tens of thousands of lines of SMF mods, rest assured that there will be good documentation for modders to get their heads round the differences.

I'm fully expecting to write a decent number of mods myself for it, btw.
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Offline hartiberlin

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Okay, the most needed features would then be

1. an included Portal,
where you can have Javascript or PHP blocks everywhere, even
between the postings, not just at the borders,
so I could use this for ads and side-menus or single
extra pages.

2. Pretty-URLs, Meta-Tags and a sitemap.xml for SEO and better Google webmastertools indexing.

3. definable keywords, that will produce links on the fly in the forum pages to internal
pages with these keywords or to external pages with affiliate links
( to generate good internal linking ( helps Google index massively !) or to earn money
with affiliate offers..)

4. a Basic template, where I can graphically change the colors for all boxes and areas
inside the admin panel
without hacking CSS codes.
It should also allow to graphically change the border sizes
without needing to hack the CSS codes.
Must only be a basic implementation, so that I can just change areas and background colors
in color by point and click.
Also nice would be a changeable header title with different fonts options, so you can easily name
your forum/portal and have it displayed at the top without needing to make a GIF banner or something like this...


If you can do all this with your fork, I would immediately switch to it.

Many thanks.

Regards, Stefan.

Offline Arantor

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What you are calling 'most needed features' are pretty much all at the very bottom of my todo list. Can't speak for Nao though.

A portal, yes, probably.

Pretty URLs is already implemented. Meta tags, yes I'll do those but not because I want to. I'm implementing those to basically defuse the "it's not good for SEO" horde BEFORE it starts. Meta tags do surprisingly little for SEO, doubly so for a forum.

If Google doesn't index your forum it's because of mods you have. It indexes mine just fine... probably because I'm not trying to shove SEO crap down its throat.

3. There's plenty of internal linking in SMF already and inherited in the fork. Again if you have issues with it it's probably either because the server is slow or it's broken by one or other of the things you've done for SEO.

4. Basic template yes. Basic template editor... it ain't on my todo list, because it actually creates far far more problems than it solves, because it invariably gets too powerful for basic users and too simple for advanced users leaving only a very tiny percentage of people it actually benefits.


Let me say this again, and remember, this is important.

We aren't doing it for you. I personally do not give two hoots if anyone uses it or not. I at least am doing it for me, for my use and making sure that I build it to cope with whatever others want to throw at it. So you can jump up and down and say you'll make the switch if we add a bunch of features that I at least am not overly interested in and as stated are implementing mostly to prevent people whining at us (less people whining about things that don't need fixing = less support hassles = more time we can actually code), but that sounds like an ultimatum to me, and I don't do so good with those.

Here's the deal: we're going to add features, that we want to use, that hopefully others will want to use too, and we release it. You install it side by side, try it out and if you like it enough, you keep it. Otherwise you ditch it and stick with your existing stuff.

That works great with me because you get the freedom to try without any obligation on your part, we get to release it without any obligation on our part, everyone's a winner. Except the people who tell us what we should or should not do, who will likely end up very unsatisfied because we're not building their dream platform, but building OUR dream platform that isn't quite up to their perfect standards.

We're not holding a gun to your head, we're not demanding you use it, nor are we begging for you to use it. When it's ready, it gets out there, and it's YOUR choice whether you try it, not ours, and throwing me a line of 'if you add x, I'll make the jump' doesn't inspire me at all. It actually makes me less interested because I have no time to cater to people who want it exactly their way.
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Offline hartiberlin

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Thanks for your answer.
Well I am not demanding anything,
I only wanted to let you know, what would be cool to have.

Yes, I will try it, when it comes out and will see, if I could use it.

Many thanks again.

Regards, Stefan.

Offline DirtRider

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You install it side by side,
How will this work, not sure what you mean here
"Four wheels move the body. Two wheels move the soul."

Offline Arantor

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Stefan, while I appreciate you are not making demands, it certainly reads that way - "I'll use your software if you implement x, y and z" and as stated these are things we are not that enthusiastic about implementing.

DirtRider, the process of moving to the fork is much the same as any other conversion - you can delete the original files, upload the new files and then import the data, or you can do it in a trial fashion, installing it in another directory, running the importer to handle all the data and so on and doing that way - and if you like it, you can then get rid of the original one, rename the folder and move it that way.

There's all kinds of ways it can be done :)
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Offline Nao/Gilles

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Oh, it's just that the default talbe prefix isn't "smf", so you install the software in the same database... And then uh... You put the files into a different folder is all...
When our converter is ready, you'll be able to import SMF data into the fork. Everything will be converted except for mods we didn't build into the software, obviously. Then you can run both forums side to side to determine which you like best.
Should be easy enough. For users, not for us :lol:

@Arantor> What you mean to say, I think, is that right now, we're really not planning to add anything that we did not think of by ourselves. When we have a demo ready and we're about to release, then maybe we'll start taking suggestions.

@All> The problem isn't that we're not listening to you guys. It's that we already have trouble keeping up with just listening to ourselves! :^^;:
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Offline Arantor

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Nao, sure that's true to a point: mostly what we're adding right now is stuff we've thought of and wanted to do, some tweaks of that have come from friends of ours, though.

Certainly for 1.0 we're building it exactly how we want it to be, rather than because anyone is telling us it *must* have something. The only things it *must* have are things like boards, topics, posts, members, because without that you don't have a forum. Everything else is a bonus, and some people want more like a CMS than a forum, and to be honest, that's not the direction I see us going down. It gets away from the forum/blog/social direction we're going in.
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