Arantor

They’re one method, but I don’t personally like it. It weaponises the reactionary instinct and instead of asking the question becomes a dare to be proven wrong. Betteridge’s Law comes to mind: any headline that asks a question can be answered with the word “no”. Often, all too often, correctly.

I’m not sure much of FB ever did was innovative per se. Functional, iterative, but very little actual originality. But it was executed well. As for relevance, their monthly revenue seems to imply it’s still relevant. Sadly.

I haven’t, but I have witnessed it a few times over the years. Often, sadly, it happens too late and that coming back from the damage done is hard work.

Kinda. Hooks are both a blessing and a curse: they give you great power but they’re also a nightmare to debug when things don’t play perfectly nicely, and that’s before we talk about actual monkey patching (what XF calls class proxying). It’s very powerful in the right circumstances, but it’s not as effective as it might seem depending on what you’re trying to do. The reality of Invision’s world is that the increased flexibility comes with a rampant increase in support costs - in XF’s case this ends up being borne by the addon authors, or they just shrug and each go “it’s their problem” pointing to the other addon where there is a problem. I get why Invision has taken the route they’ve taken, and on some level I’m not sure it’s the wrong answer. While there is a place for customisation, I sometimes wonder if the rich ecosystem XF has is a symptom of a different problem. We can talk more once I’ve had a go writing an addon for Invision.

There’s already some resources updated to IC5 by the looks of things. But you have a valid point.

I don’t know if people have seen this, going to assume not, but there is a pretty interesting directory of Invision customisations on Invisioneer. https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/ Interesting reading for sure.

No, I won’t be the last, not by a long shot. Thing is, I know where this goes. I know what it looks like to live long enough to see yourself become the villain and not realise you’re doing it, and what it does to those around you. I’m not sure XF will see the end of the 2020s without significant change.

I also learned that I’m partially moderated on the site as I can’t edit my signature. But no one has actually talked to me, I’ve had several posts deleted (some without even a reason or notification) and no warning or courtesy message. You’d think that when you have a customer who’s been paying on and off (mostly on) for 14 years (if nothing else thah at times because I believed in what they were doing) that that would be worth something but I guess they don’t want my renewal.

My reaction is specifically to Paul B. His entire attitude is inappropriate and as I said in a now deleted topic, I don’t see XF as a serious business any more.

Scratch this. I’m moving the project to Invision, so there’s no need to build out this functionality in XF.

Apparently just deleting posts is the answer, if you’re the XF team.

Both “we’ve made a lot of improvements” and “it doesn’t look like there are major changes from the outside” can absolutely be true, just as they are here. The problem is, immediately getting defensive about it means you can’t see the actual problem being raised that is there. That’s also why I went out of my way repeatedly to point out that there are improvements but they’re underselling it. Of course the lack of headline features is a problem in its own right. As for “build it and they will come”… it’s one of those things that’s highly specific. It glosses over the fact that you did still have to put work in, but certain niches were always easier to get off the ground than others. It definitely isn’t as easy now to do the same thing, and people attribute that to social media and other things - but they gloss over that it wasn’t ever quite as easy as they might have remembered. Anyway, that was then, and this is now, and by now the rules have changed. Whatever might have worked then won’t fly now, and that’s OK, the world has evolved and so too must admins, the tools they use, and the strategies how they use them.

That’s just it, it wasn’t obvious to me.

It doesn’t mean that outside of the forum world, though. It doesn’t even mean that across all of the forum world, it only means that in the specific platforms that call it that. E.g. SMF calls it maintenance mode rather than offline (and has for the last 20 years)

TipTap as a framework for doing that is an option, but I have all sorts of choices at my disposable. I am always interested in what content management options people feel they don’t have with the current solutions. The “wouldn't it be good if” stuff. As well as the “can’t live without” stuff. I have a list in my head (as above) of the key things and some of the nice to haves but I’d love to know if this is on track with what people actually would use.

Truth be told I wasn’t planning on using the TipTap editor for majority of content creation, and the times it does come up, I’m not seeing it be a huge problem. Thing is, the editor in XF is simply not suitable for actually writing long form content that isn’t just mostly text. Consider Gutenberg from WordPress - that’s really the minimum viable bar here for building out articles and similar, because even something as simple as “I want to put text and an image side by side” is an utter pain in a glorified bbcode editor. And that’s fine, because a glorified bbcode editor isn’t designed to build pages with. (I know people prefer the classic editor. But they’re not usually trying to build responsive pages that aren’t primarily text in them.) My main problem is really “I want to do all the things, ideally in a way that is shareable with others if people care, and if they do, what is the most sensible order to do things in that people can start using it and giving feedback”. It would be very easy for me to sit back and just build exactly what I need for me, I’d be done in a fraction of the time, but I’ve always believed in sharing. In fact the only drama with integrating Gutenberg outright is the licence doesn’t let me.

Food for thought: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/xf-2-4-general-discussion-feedback-complaints-random-off-topic-posts-etc.225303/post-1719275

Hmm, initial takeaway thought: no one seems interested in a CMS for XF porting the one feature from Invision that everyone thinks is most awesome. Eh, oh well.

Less janky, hopefully. The current one has all sorts of exciting and annoying niggles to it.

You and I have different definitions of offline, it seems… to me, offline is “not connected to the internet”.

If it's offline how will they post to it?

Two methods. 1) Normalise the behaviour you want to see. In any population people will naturally gravitate towards what is normal and expected. This is because we are a social species at heart and we want to conform by default: we want to belong. If it’s very clear that undesired behaviour is an exception, people will naturally avoid it, and they will even go out of their way to call it out for what it is. In an ideal world this can even be largely self policing. 2) particularly if you have the early adopter enthusiast crowd vs a laggard, curmudgeon crowd, love bomb the early adopters. They’ll bring the laggards with them. Whatever you do, do not normalise that toxicity is acceptable. Give it boundaries and make it clear what is and is not acceptable. Gentle taps on the shoulder, ideally from your community steering it for you (as above), then time outs, then banning. Going immediately to Defcon 3 isn’t ideal either - because sometimes you just have a person having a bad day or a bad week and you might find this is lashing out because they can’t cope. I also find it can work that if I do reach out to someone, my question isn’t “why did you do that” but “are you OK, you seem upset about x” and go for getting their side of it - really it’s just an application of my first two points: normalising the notion that acting out is, just that, acting out rather than an ingrained pattern of behaviour.

So I thought I'd put this out there because I'm having a hard time nailing down exactly what the scope of the project should be. I have two concurrent projects, both interrelated. One is a forum with side content (articles, resources, reviews etc.), the other is, well, the CMS to power the first. And I got all excited and made a list of notes about all the things I want to build - and eventually make available - but I'm having a hard time keeping it straight and deciding what's important. So I thought I'd open it to this community - I don't really want to open it to a much larger discussion pool just yet because I will get overwhelmed in so doing. That can be a 1.1 or 1.2 time. It's not helped by the fact that I'm inspired by multiple other systems that do similar things and I'm unable to pin down what I need/want out of these because the answer of 'should it be A or B? yes' isn't helpful :P So, without much more ado, I present my ridiculous plans for XenFolio, a CMS addon for XF. Feature 1: Channels You define channels of content, areas of the site that each have reasonably homogenous content to each other. You then define what the content model is: if I define a channel that is 'articles', at a minimum I want title, body, meta tag stuff and maybe a couple of images (e.g. if I'm going to display them as a grid, I want a nice chunky image for it) so I set out that this is the content model I want to use, that each of the articles has these things, and I can either use an existing (provided) template for showing one article, or add a custom one, then I can say 'this collection, articles, has an index of articles and it should use a grid layout' Feature 1a: Channel Node In much the same way you can define a search node, you should be able to define a channel node that actually feels like it's intentionally there, not like a link forum that is obviously a link forum. Feature 2: Standalone Pages Should be able to make standalone pages constructed out of regular content, plus existing XF widgets. A drag and drop interface would be nice but not likely a 1.0 feature just because so much other stuff to do to even get to that point. Pages also should be able to opt out of the PAGE_CONTAINER if appropriate. Feature 3: Media Library A place to upload images and other files, organised into folders. Probably with a core private/public separation where public ones can live on a CDN and don't get routed through XF; private ones with some permission controls. Where it all gets messy is that I find myself thinking about things I do in the WordPress world where I sometimes define post types for things that won't ever get an index page but will be transplanted into something else (e.g. testimonials that then have widgets for display elsewhere) where channels do work in this context. Or even some kind of bbcode-esque display for them inside other pages somehow. And of course there's about a million side things this brings up: do pages have a hierarchy (probably?), categories and tags (probably? global or per content channel?), revision history (almost certainly?), approval workflows (maybe?), redirection management (probably?) - and of course whether to stick with 'XF's bundled editor' for content creation or to add something else. There are definite temptations for adding something like Gutenberg in as an option because as a content creator there are things it does that I really like in terms of showing me the document structure... The one line description I have in my head is of course Invision Pages but for XF (their Databases feature is my Channels feature at heart), but it's more nuanced than that and more complicated because I find some of what Invision does to be fussy and clunky, and potentially there might be desires to do things like permissions for content channels (e.g. some sections being admin only, others might invite some other people in to write) It's my first XF addon so there's a lot of learning going on, translating 'how I'd do this in that platform' to 'thinking about it in XF terms' and that's been an interesting journey so far. There are things about the existing plugin choices (notably AMS, XenPorta and a few others) that are influencing my thoughts but ultimately I'm not looking to make knockoffs of those because I think they do things in a way I don't like, hence XenFolio's coming into existence at all. So I'd like to get some thoughts on what people think, in particular must have/must not have/nice to have features. I definitely do not want to call it Databases anywhere though!

The only difference is time. I've been at this a while and circumstances fell in such a way that I found myself doing it full time - at a time when I had the capacity to spend time learning and refining. HTML was much simpler in 1998 when I first tried it... 😬 but honestly, the main difference isn't that I'm smarter but simply that I've been able to dump the time into it - and when I came to PHP it wasn't my first language, it wasn't even my first server language, I'd done what we'd now call ASP Classic before that, and I wrote desktop apps before that. I still have a little desktop Hangman-style game I wrote in Visual Basic in 2001. (Incidentally it still works, sorta, in Windows 10. Haven't tried on 11. Probably breaks under the high-DPI screen displays of now though.) jQuery was great when it first came about because browsers were janky and inconsistent about things like sizing and positioning (looking at you IE6) and AJAX was still way too annoying to do by hand when it was still ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") that we had to use because XMLHttpRequest wasn't yet standard. These days it's very convenient for some work but honestly the biggest thing to relearn is AJAX, everything else is fairly straightforward. While some will advocate for axios, fetch is pretty standard now and after a fashion becomes fairly second nature to set up because syntactivally it's not that different. The thing about what Tyrsson and I talk about is that it kind of is a different world, at least at first. In the browser world, everything is event driven - you have the page, it has a DOM, and everything (give or take) is waiting for something to happen, and once that does, whether it's a keypress or a click or something else, you have an event listener that does something. Maybe it does some transformation of the DOM, maybe it fires off an AJAX call, which in itself fires off an event when it's done. The world persists in the meantime, within bounds. In the server world, this is not really how it works. Yes, on some fundamental level, PHP is sat there waiting for an event - it's waiting for a browser to make a request, but at that point, everything might as well be entirely synchronous: we don't generally deal with callbacks and listeners in the same way, we think about the request being 'a request comes in, an answer is going to go out, and we're going to do a series of operations in the middle'. It is, for want of a better metaphor, a pipe. You set out what steps happen between the start and the end of the pipe and you have to remember that, by default, the world is a blank slate - the server doesn't, by default, know or care which user it is, it's just asked for a page and you have to give an answer. So we end up fiddling around concepts like cookies and sessions which are essentially grafts on top of HTTP for trying to remember who a user is because none of this was in the design, and we end up fiddling with databases for where we store the data in between the requests, and to serve 'the same thing to everyone'. So it is fundamentally different on some level. But.... that said... the notion of a loop waiting for events is common to almost every area of computing (whether it's games, web, regular applications) - it's part of the circle of computing life: begin -> input -> process -> output -> feedback -> repeat. The only difference is how often that cycle happens, and what we accept as input, what we process and what we output. Games do this in very tight cycles - reading input 60 times a second, updating the world according to its rules (and player input) and showing the output; applications like Word have the same loop but they don't need to do anything most of those 60 times a second, as they only need to update when the user does something; web has the same cycle again but the chances that a user interaction has a change are even lower. The slice that Tyrsson and I see is that we're usually responsible for handling the input -> process -> output part and the user does the feedback and repeat parts in the browser. And we come from an environment where it's been actively worked on for the last 25 years such that it has a series of conventions, common design wisdom etc. where we've all been refining as we go for the last 25 years (PHP, such as you could recognise it as PHP, arrived in 1999 or so) Where all this is going is back to the start: programming is programming, we all do the same fundamental things - we sit and explain, patiently, to a computer what we want it to do and we let it go do that, very quickly. It's also one of the reasons that 'learn more languages' is always encouraged because as you do that, being able to see how everything is all really the same, just taking different slices through it, becomes that much easier. I'm sure you'll get there if you want to get there. There's also so many resources out there to learn from. The thing about applying oneself is that this also applies to me - I've been struggling with procrastination and burnout lately and I'm beginning to understand what this really means, that it's a pain avoidance response, and that the questions to ask are 'what has it already cost you by not applying' / 'if you continued to not apply, what would it cost you' and 'what would it mean if you did'. It seems trite but those three questions, if looked at honestly and critically, can change your outlook - if you want them to.

Huh, interesting.