SMF Dev Blog #42: The Blog About Life, The Universe And Everything

[gonemental]

I'm not looking for it, because it mean re-hacking my board to make it look how i want it.

and that's why CSS exists.

in any "normal' CMS you can get 90% of what you need just editing the CSS files, and
the rest with very small hacks in template overrides.

with SMF (and most of the other forums too) you're screwed.
even moving the avatar up or down will take 1 hour if you don't know SMF.

i don't know about you but time is money and clients aren't impressed to hear
you need hours to move an image up or down or make a custom field
or whatever other easy task that elsewhere takes 5 minutes in CSS.

[Tristan Perry]

I'm not looking for it, because it mean re-hacking my board to make it look how i want it.

and that's why CSS exists.

in any "normal' CMS you can get 90% of what you need just editing the CSS files, and
the rest with very small hacks in template overrides.

with SMF (and most of the other forums too) you're screwed.
even moving the avatar up or down will take 1 hour if you don't know SMF.

i don't know about you but time is money and clients aren't impressed to hear
you need hours to move an image up or down or make a custom field
or whatever other easy task that elsewhere takes 5 minutes in CSS.

Hence Curve, in 2.0? (Haven't been following this topic 100%, so apologies if this post seems out of place)

[Arantor]

Thank you for just proving what we've been saying. Even other software - that is more modular - have the same problem.

The fundamental problem you cannot avoid with forums is that the display and data are intrinsically connected. Making it more modular will not help with that. So, yes, moving the avatar up and down will take an hour if you don't know SMF. Doing a similar small change will take an hour if you don't know MyBB, phpBB or whatever -- you mentioned Wikipedia. That's nice and modular. Ever try modding it? Good luck with that unless it's reasonably simple and restricted to purely CSS. (My first mod for Wikipedia took me three FULL days to figure out and it was a very simple function that ideally should have been a template but was actually easier to figure out how to put into the core code in the end)

But in fact your fundamental argument about CSS... guess what RC2 will bring? Curve: a tableless theme that should be a ton easier to configure purely with CSS.


No-one here is asking you to use SMF. If you don't like the way it is developed, please by all means go use something else. But the fuller feature set an app has, no matter if it's the most modular thing on Earth, or the least, the harder work it is to modify something.

If you want to make a bigger discussion, here is not the place. There is a proper board for discussing SMF coding, please go there.

[aldo]

Well, the thing is backwards compatibility is not always good. Having all that legacy support slows things down, and can lead to future security issues.

I'm not saying that rewriting everything for every version is bad, but I am not saying its good either.

[Antechinus]

But in fact your fundamental argument about CSS... guess what RC2 will bring? Curve: a tableless theme that should be a ton easier to configure purely with CSS.

Just a point here. Curve is not completely tableless. It has a lot less tables than 1.1.x (and halle-bloody-lujah for that) and a distinct lack of horribly nested tables anywhere (and there was great rejoicing) but it does still use some tables where appropriate.

[Fustrate]

Tables for tabular data

[Leemy]

I havent looked at the code, so im glad to hear it's not 100% tableless. I hear on reddit on a weekly basis how trendy developers have tried to make their site 100% tableless and it was just *more* complicated and *slower* uff

[Antechinus]

Can be. It depends what you are doing. Tables have their place, as does every other html element. The trick is to use the right things in the right places.

[aldo]

I havent looked at the code, so im glad to hear it's not 100% tableless. I hear on reddit on a weekly basis how trendy developers have tried to make their site 100% tableless and it was just *more* complicated and *slower* uff

Yeah, because after awhile you probably end up with div's inside div's inside div's (Need I continue?) to get the effects you need without tables.

Like everyone has said, I agree that tables have their place... Especially since all browsers output tables almost the same

[Tristan Perry]

I havent looked at the code, so im glad to hear it's not 100% tableless. I hear on reddit on a weekly basis how trendy developers have tried to make their site 100% tableless and it was just *more* complicated and *slower* uff

Yeah, because after awhile you probably end up with div's inside div's inside div's (Need I continue?) to get the effects you need without tables.

Like everyone has said, I agree that tables have their place... Especially since all browsers output tables almost the same

Anybody who *doesn't* use tables for tabulated data is a bit... well... silly (to put it nicely )

Tables nowadays (using <th>, <thead> for headers, scope atrributes, ids, <tbody>, <caption>, etc) can be made *very* accessible. Hence if you have tabulated data, they are the *only* think you should consider using since for a screen reader user, they are the only chance that the screen reader user has of being able to understand their content.

I know this thread isn't suggesting SMF scraps tables or anything, but just thought I'd insert this mini-post rant () since there are some who don't use tables at all, which is odd.

[青山 素子]

I know this thread isn't suggesting SMF scraps tables or anything, but just thought I'd insert this mini-post rant () since there are some who don't use tables at all, which is odd.

People who insist that you can never use any tables, even for tabular data, are just as bad as the people that insist in doing all their layout using tables. Both are ignoring the point that you should use the most appropriate markup for the job.


As for gonemental, it seems you stopped following SMF development back in the early 1.1 days. While some of your points are valid, many of them are since resolved in 2.0. As for abstracting things and not hard-coding them, SMF does its best to keep display logic in the templates and program logic in the source files.

We are looking to eventually be a bit more abstract and maybe even clean up the way packages are handled, but we hope to be more evolutionary in that goal rather than tossing everything out. Unless there is a darn good reason to go breaking something, that is.

[DenDen60]

Well nice work team. I have been away for more then a year  now and I see that a lot of people are still at work. Great.

Summer is almost over, at least since school is starting in my neck of the woods, will RC2 be release soon?

Thanks

[Yigal]

Well Aaron said that he is "counting" for it to come out this summer. Probably before 2010 though.  Let's not rush them...once RC2 comes out....all people will ask is for RC2.1

[Antechinus]

RC2.1? Don't even think about it. Next thing after RC2 is RC3.

[Özgür]

once RC2 comes out....all people will ask is for RC2.1

Definitely no!! For example me , i wait to curve and some solved bugs (speacially Wysivg and sha1 login problem bug.).

[Adish - (F.L.A.M.E.R)]

RC2.1? Don't even think about it. Next thing after RC2 is RC3.

People are tired of x.1 versions now.. You can start the x.1 versions after the final is out! Every emergency patch freaks people out!

[Antechinus]

The only x.1 version I want to see is SMF 2.1 Final. That one is going to rock (and no, I'm not going to hazard a guess at a release date ).

[Kenny01]

Why the rush for version 2, it's not a do or die game.
Guys leave the devs alone, i'm ready to wait till when the script is well bake.

[Adish - (F.L.A.M.E.R)]

Why the rush for version 2, it's not a do or die game.
Guys leave the devs alone, i'm ready to wait till when the script is well bake.

2.x feature list has made people go crazy everyone wants their forum to be hassle free! Currently in 1.x versions, alot of modification complications arise. To avoid that, many of the features used by a average user have been put up into 2.x versions to avoid more problems. Also the custom theme modification hassles have been minimized due to the 2.x version features.

2.x will show how simple is SMF. It will define the simplicity.

[Arantor]

Not to mention that a number of features that were mods in 1.1 are now core in 2.0.