A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #15 – February 11, 2013, 10:24:29 pm

There is a very good point here, cross-posts in this thread. (even when you folks seem to disagree

)

We move towards extracting commonalities between kinds of content. Create better prototypes of a 'post' or 'article', refactor or write/rewrite their functionality in terms of an API, and allow the prototype(s) to serve both, but distinguish their available features.

Some of it might be part of our current refactoring. (or might not enter; we don't really plan on which item, with a few exceptions, we want to work, but in general on 'items that have redundant code, etc', so we might get to a specific case or not).

We will be back on this after 1.0 stable release, be sure.

For the moment, lets clarify one thing here, please:
Portals (and SMF mods) are easy to update to Elk. The issue "do we have portals" is a non-issue. Yes.

On the other hand, personally, more than a simple update, I understand an integration in Elk or a full refactoring of portals isn't a good idea nor an interesting idea to people. That's okay.
I suggest we make a few test runs soon - say in a couple weeks, to test and update them. TP is on github, find it, test it, propose a pull request, report issues to Brad.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #16 – February 11, 2013, 10:34:14 pm

Quote from: TestMonkey – February 11, 2013, 10:24:29 pmThere is a very good point here,..........

I assure you that was completely unintentional, and wont happen again.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #17 – February 11, 2013, 10:44:59 pm

Quote from: Antechinus – February 11, 2013, 10:34:14 pm
Quote from: TestMonkey – February 11, 2013, 10:24:29 pmThere is a very good point here,..........
I assure you that was completely unintentional, and wont happen again.

lol. Well at SMF this would have already been a drama topic that reached page 10 at this point in any discussion about such things. So to see this kind of discussion from reasoned individuals is a bit of fresh air if you ask me. Would be great to have a createPost() function that could be wrapped into the API to post articles. Things like that would make portals have a little less code.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #18 – February 11, 2013, 10:59:35 pm

How do you envisage that function working, in rough terms?

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #19 – February 11, 2013, 11:51:21 pm

Well I hadn't fleshed out the idea yet really. But can definitely use it to do a BBC article. Even an html article. And even though I'm no veteran coder, it would be nice to see it be able to handle more parameters for article options, that could use call back functions to handle such things. If that makes any sense to anyone. For all I know I could be speaking Taiwanese...

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #20 – February 12, 2013, 04:13:33 am

Quote from: Antechinus – February 11, 2013, 04:35:20 pmSeveral ways. For a start, you don't have all the crap associated with posts. Userarea area, sigs, etc. This means cleaner presentation of content, which is important sometimes.

Different theme.

emanuele whistles innocently.

Quote from: Antechinus – February 11, 2013, 04:35:20 pmAlso, since an "article" is basically just a wrapper for a custom html page, you can do what you damned well like on it.

Ohh...then you are talking about posting HTML, not about "an article system".

Quote from: Antechinus – February 11, 2013, 04:35:20 pmAlso, if you give a rat's, it's far cleaner in terms of code and performance because you're not running everything through parse_bbc.

And far less secure unless you sanitize the code (and remove anything that is not simple html, already allowed in posts too using the html tag).

Quote from: Antechinus – February 11, 2013, 04:35:20 pmCould the same content be presented as a series of forum posts? Sure it could, but for some purposes it would be a crappier format.

I agree that in order to be able to have easy and nicely formatted pages, some tags are missing,
Having some more tags (for example h2/3/4/5/6) we could even create TOCs the way wikimedia does, or just some more attributes to existing ones would allow better formatting (float for images, width for tables, etc.).

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #21 – February 12, 2013, 05:41:53 am

No, not a different theme. People don't want to have to code and install more themes when they want a couple of portal pages.

HTML includes articles. They can be HTML or PHP. They can be used for what you'd think of as articles, or for custom pages, or both.

Not less secure, if done properly.

Why more tags? That's just bringing you back to running everything through parse_bbc.

And you're still not talking about all the other stuff portals do.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #22 – February 12, 2013, 08:34:54 am

Quote from: Antechinus – February 12, 2013, 05:41:53 amNo, not a different theme. People don't want to have to code and install more themes when they want a couple of portal pages.

If you create a different theme and make it so the topic is shown as a "page", 99.9% of the people will not notice the difference.
You said that people don't care about the back-end (Nov. 2012

), and I can add they just want to see what they think they want.
Heck, I have to finish the "building_blocks" branch.

Quote from: Antechinus – February 12, 2013, 05:41:53 amHTML includes articles. They can be HTML or PHP. They can be used for what you'd think of as articles, or for custom pages, or both.

Not less secure, if done properly.

Then you have to maintain: preparsecode, parse_bbc and another parallel code to "properly cleanup" HTML (and you have to remove several...well, you have to leave in place only few things if you want to do it properly).
Apart from the fact that PHP will never ever be secure, but that's another issue.

Quote from: Antechinus – February 12, 2013, 05:41:53 amWhy more tags? That's just bringing you back to running everything through parse_bbc.

Oohhh...FFS!
Do you know how many times parse_bbc runs in a normal topic page?
I'll give you a hint:
1 time for the news
1 time for each message,
* 1 time for each signature (one for each user).
If you have 20 messages from 20 different user it means 41 times.
You are talking about 1 (one) message (it may be long, but that' doesn't make much difference) alone in a page. How much do you think it will impact on the server load? I'll give you a hint: less then 1 (one) single query of 1 (one) single member running unread replies with a week of unread messages.
And you have the advantage of consistent styling (no need to re-define styles for articles when links wouldn't have the "bbc_link" class attached, for example), you don't have to care about cleaning up the HTML (preparsecode will do it just fine for ~~you~~ us), you now even have a good WYSIWYG editor (so styling is not an issue).

So, the only thing missing is some fancy styling of some part of the text if you need it.

Dunno...I see a slightly more flexible parse_bbc would be much more helpful than HTML, but that's just me.

Quote from: Antechinus – February 12, 2013, 05:41:53 amAnd you're still not talking about all the other stuff portals do.

I'm not arguing against portals, that's why I'm not talking about other things.

I'm trying to understand what an "article" is in your head.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #23 – February 12, 2013, 02:02:40 pm

I can't see the "different theme" working at all. Obvious scenario: a site that offers more than one theme. If you can come up with a way of automatically assigning consistent styling regardless of which theme the user has selected, then I'll consider "different theme for articles". Otherwise, it's a dead duck.

QuoteThen you have to maintain: preparsecode, parse_bbc and another parallel code to "properly cleanup" HTML

Ok, but since portals already have this code anyway.........................................

QuoteOohhh...FFS!
Do you know how many times parse_bbc runs in a normal topic page?
I'll give you a hint:
1 time for the news
1 time for each message,
* 1 time for each signature (one for each user).
If you have 20 messages from 20 different user it means 41 times.
You are talking about 1 (one) message (it may be long, but that' doesn't make much difference) alone in a page. How much do you think it will impact on the server load? I'll give you a hint: less then 1 (one) single query of 1 (one) single member running unread replies with a week of unread messages.
And you have the advantage of consistent styling (no need to re-define styles for articles when links wouldn't have the "bbc_link" class attached, for example), you don't have to care about cleaning up the HTML (preparsecode will do it just fine for you us), you now even have a good WYSIWYG editor (so styling is not an issue).

So, the only thing missing is some fancy styling of some part of the text if you need it.

Dunno...I see a slightly more flexible parse_bbc would be much more helpful than HTML, but that's just me.

Ok, now you're starting to make sense.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #24 – October 04, 2013, 05:47:31 am

https://bitbucket.org/spuds_/elk_simpleportal

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #25 – October 07, 2013, 11:35:14 pm

By the by, SP is definitely changing our license for the next release to be friendlier. Stay tuned.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #26 – October 21, 2013, 06:46:40 pm

Great work! Really glad to see Elk SP.

The portal was one of the core needs for Elk. The sky is the limit now.

As I said elsewhere, I suggest to make a github clone. Git hooks can keep synchronized.

Re: A forum without a portal is like pizza without cheese

Reply #27 – March 18, 2014, 06:08:46 pm

This thing needs tableless markup.