As-long as it doesn't go SPA. That was a disaster for Discourse in the customisability department among other things.
Every Discourse instance looks the same. Those which don't look like horrible hacks or minor alterations.
It's beyond me why people actually migrate to it over XenForo. This is probably one of the things keeping MyBB afloat.
If Discourse is something MyBB is worried about, then do care in mind the lack of support for non-paid users (starts at $100/month), the lack of customisability, etc. despite the five full-time developers.
Discourse is very much a money making operation.
This is one reason why MyBB should promote it's plugins a lot more, many of the features people want are in plugins, perhaps use a few big ones on these very forums. "Good enough" is often enough in contrast to modern functionality at the cost of customisability or dropping down $140 for XenForo. But of course, MyBB can't waste too much time.
The thing is. MyBB has every feature Discourse has. The ones it doesn't are ones which would be extremely to implement with PHP efficiently. Live Alerts, Live Topics, Live Many Things, etc. But, MyBB hides it's plugins away in a little section of the site.
(2017-10-05, 10:16 PM)Azah Wrote: [ -> ]Things go easiest when you're rolling your own software.
You must be joking.
Ben ninja-ed me, I spend too much composing single posts :o
Anyway. The only features Discourse has which MyBB doesn't in some form are new versions of ES and SASS.
It *would* be nice, if many things were core, buuuut. As Stefan put it, you can pretty much pretend that MyBB is a modern software a bit, while you toss things together.
How many people know MyAlerts exists? It's a serious question. How many know that it exists?
In fact, let's look at the mods site. Where is it? I can't see it on the front-page. All I can see are themes, a shoutbox, and ProStats. One of the most important plugins for modernising MyBB seems to be hidden away.
Also to Ben. Forum software aren't that hard to build. They just take time. A lot of time. But, they're not that complicated. It's even easier when you do it for your own site, as you can just hard-code is_admin flags instead of plopping down forum permissions and other things in contrast to a general purpose software like MyBB.
Edit: Just did a search. I can't find MyAlerts at all in the mods site.
(2017-10-05, 11:23 PM)Azah Wrote: [ -> ]Also to Ben. Forum software aren't that hard to build. They just take time. A lot of time. But, they're not that complicated. It's even easier when you do it for your own site, as you can just hard-code is_admin flags instead of plopping down forum permissions and other things in contrast to a general purpose software like MyBB.
Secure forum softwares, like all secure scripts, can be - and they're a blueberry to keep up to date. I would know...
Also, if you're plopping down is_admin strings, you're doing it wrong. That's not secure at all.
I do not. I do general purpose ones. But, it's the simplest way of doing a permissions system. How is it insecure?
I would argue that a more complex permissions system has more opportunities for security exploits, and you will have to write many, many more tests to get perfect coverage.
Many libraries and frameworks can abstract away details like security away from you.
Of course, it doesn't mean you should completely ignore security, you should always take the time to learn about threats, but they do a pretty good job in contrast to the cowboy days of doing everything 100% from scratch.
Edit: Also, that would be a boolean variable, not a string.
I know of big boards which left MyBB to go custom because of 1.8 / 2.0. If you have a good programmer, it's perfectly viable and kind of sad in a way as people are reinventing the wheel over and over. It also shows that there's no good alternative to MyBB.
Oh you're talking about frameworks. Carry on - I thought you meant completely custom; which can be a pain in the arse. Especially when you're "just learning a language".
We're probably better off discussing caveats of custom privately... since this would be off topic for an RFC on MyBB's development
(2017-10-05, 11:23 PM)Azah Wrote: [ -> ]How many people know MyAlerts exists? It's a serious question. How many know that it exists?
In fact, let's look at the mods site. Where is it? I can't see it on the front-page. All I can see are themes, a shoutbox, and ProStats. One of the most important plugins for modernising MyBB seems to be hidden away.
Quote:Just did a search. I can't find MyAlerts at all in the mods site.
Pulled off Extend because of additional release overhead (now only on
GitHub); current mods site doesn't take advantage of repositories or Composer packages as 1.8 doesn't provide a good environment for that; that's also one of the reasons for the long moderation queue - it's hard to enforce high quality code in extensions when the core itself is poorly written.
Similarly, there are not many plugins that could be marked as "featured" (and presented e.g. on the homepage) as most contain hacks that make it possible to take partial advantage of OOP or intercept logic from the core.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewrite-in-elm/48677/11
Discourse's views on rewrites are kind of interesting, one situation even seems eerily similar to MyBB.
Quote:Every time I participated in a full rewrite it was a fail of medium to large proportions.
At my first job (ChaosMusic) we had a CDNOW like clone, we decided that at one point Microsoft Commerce Server was a mess and started doing this gigantic rewrite. The company eventually ran out of money before we managed to launch it. It was so cool, the UI was so much better, etc... But ... launching it was impossible and eventually the company ran out of money, I left, and the rewrite was "lost" somehow which was fitting.
At my second job (Altiris, later on acquired by Symantec) they decided to rewrite the flagship product "Notification Server" between version 6 and 7. It was an insane engineering effort. I ran the "sustained engineering" team. Which was in charge of fixing bugs and supporting the actual product we were selling. More than half of the engineering team was sequestered away writing wonderful new bugs and a magical new platform that was going to solve all our pains we had with 6.
Needless to say this was a phenomenal failure of gigantic proportions, NS7 is now mostly dead, partly cause symantec killed it and partly cause it sucked.
So yeah...
The 1.10 RFC *sounds* nice but it's just as unrealistic as 2.0 if there is no powerhouse behind it to actually pull it through.
Very ambitious plans, it's a lot of work. If it was easy, someone would have already done it. If *you* can actually do it, go right ahead. If you're just asking others to do it for you, probably it won't happen.
I fully support a stop gap before 2.0, I've been reluctant to do any work on 1.8.x series mostly because of the mess it's become over the years with hotfixes. It's so far behind modern development practices, it's no one fault it's there hasn't been a major overhaul to bring it up to date.
It's almost impossible to version control any forum right now due to templates being stored in the database, I've had to write a script to export the templates to file to be version controlled on each commit.
Anyway here is a list of things I'd personally like to see in a 1.10 release in terms of importance and would be happy to contribute towards the development
- Composer
- File based template(Preferably twig templating)
- Routing(With Controllers?)
- An ORM(Eloquent/Doctrine)
- If not an ORM then a database class that utilises PDO
- Make the minimum PHP version requirement PHP7.0
- Since we're moving towards more frontend driven development maybe more of an API approach?