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Yves
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Subject: On the way to 1.5.4...
Hey everyone,
since I got to working a little more the last couple of days, I have almost completed my big code clean-up.
This means there should be less compatibility problems with other applications like function name collisions or overlapping global variables, cleaner HTML code and an overall more reasoned, better documented source code. Sounds good so far... but the other side is that most of your customisations will likely not work any longer without processing them the same way I did with my part. Meaning mostly renaming global function names and variables. I'll release a more detailed change log with the next devel snapshot release.
You might already have seen a higher bug tracker activity the last days. I finally closed some of the older tasks that have little influence on everyday work. But they need to be handled, too, now that I have a never-forgetting (nor forgiving) bug remembering system...
And on my way through the source, I already identified issues that haven't even been discovered yet. I guess that's what they mean by "code reviews".
Well, so far nothing dramatically changed on the user side. I'll soon start working on a complete database abstraction so that you can go ahead and create PostgreSQL, SQL Server or SQlite backends for this forum. I'm not sure yet about how to handle transaction features but will probably not use them for now.
At that point, I'm going to release another version of the software. It's not going to be labelled "stable" or something the like, but I'd appreciate if as many of you could just do some testing with it as you have time to. Maybe there's something I missed during my multiple passes of code updating...
Having that done, the next thing is HTML templates. Now this is going to take great effects on the surface, step by step. I don't want to map the current HTML code that's scattered through the whole system into the new HTML templates but rather create a slightly new and more modern layout. I have some design studies lying around here and some of you might already have seen them, to all others: be curious about it! We're approaching the dream of a perfect web forum...
I'm planning to convert one page and one view after another, until every aspect is controlled by a template. I have no exact plan of the template structure yet, there might be some discussion about it in this forum. As far as I can tell, this templates feature is one of the more requested by users willing to modify the board's appearance. Using tagged plain HTML will make this much easier then. Only so much for now: I won't integrate a ready template engine, it will be the one I wrote on my own some months ago for this purpose. In some fast-run tests it already showed the double performance of a comparable Smarty setup, so I'm confident it won't take the overall performance down too much.
Well, and finally, I'll go on with re-designing the Admin CP and finishing the plug-in system, along with fixing some more minor bugs that have been around for some time. I hope I can keep my current schedule so that version 1.5.4 will be ready to release in about June or (more likely) July. As for the roadmap beyond that point, I'll rethink it all in a while and might move the one or the other item a bit up or down on the list. The biggest discussion point is "private/group messaging", intended to replace conventional PM (board private messaging) systems.
OK, so you're a bit more like informed about what I'm doing these days for now and you know I'm still alive and doing something useful.
since I got to working a little more the last couple of days, I have almost completed my big code clean-up.
This means there should be less compatibility problems with other applications like function name collisions or overlapping global variables, cleaner HTML code and an overall more reasoned, better documented source code. Sounds good so far... but the other side is that most of your customisations will likely not work any longer without processing them the same way I did with my part. Meaning mostly renaming global function names and variables. I'll release a more detailed change log with the next devel snapshot release.You might already have seen a higher bug tracker activity the last days. I finally closed some of the older tasks that have little influence on everyday work. But they need to be handled, too, now that I have a never-forgetting (nor forgiving) bug remembering system...
And on my way through the source, I already identified issues that haven't even been discovered yet. I guess that's what they mean by "code reviews".Well, so far nothing dramatically changed on the user side. I'll soon start working on a complete database abstraction so that you can go ahead and create PostgreSQL, SQL Server or SQlite backends for this forum. I'm not sure yet about how to handle transaction features but will probably not use them for now.
At that point, I'm going to release another version of the software. It's not going to be labelled "stable" or something the like, but I'd appreciate if as many of you could just do some testing with it as you have time to. Maybe there's something I missed during my multiple passes of code updating...
Having that done, the next thing is HTML templates. Now this is going to take great effects on the surface, step by step. I don't want to map the current HTML code that's scattered through the whole system into the new HTML templates but rather create a slightly new and more modern layout. I have some design studies lying around here and some of you might already have seen them, to all others: be curious about it! We're approaching the dream of a perfect web forum...
I'm planning to convert one page and one view after another, until every aspect is controlled by a template. I have no exact plan of the template structure yet, there might be some discussion about it in this forum. As far as I can tell, this templates feature is one of the more requested by users willing to modify the board's appearance. Using tagged plain HTML will make this much easier then. Only so much for now: I won't integrate a ready template engine, it will be the one I wrote on my own some months ago for this purpose. In some fast-run tests it already showed the double performance of a comparable Smarty setup, so I'm confident it won't take the overall performance down too much.
Well, and finally, I'll go on with re-designing the Admin CP and finishing the plug-in system, along with fixing some more minor bugs that have been around for some time. I hope I can keep my current schedule so that version 1.5.4 will be ready to release in about June or (more likely) July. As for the roadmap beyond that point, I'll rethink it all in a while and might move the one or the other item a bit up or down on the list. The biggest discussion point is "private/group messaging", intended to replace conventional PM (board private messaging) systems.
OK, so you're a bit more like informed about what I'm doing these days for now and you know I'm still alive and doing something useful.
♪ ...nanananah, all in all we’re just brilliant thieves, nanananah... ♪♬
This post was edited on 2005-06-16, 18:50 by 