2
« Last post by Arantor on Today at 06:04:22 PM »
Instead of talking in hypotheticals, let's talk in actuals.
I have a fork of SMF. Anyone who cared to look this up on GitHub would see this. This is fine, it has a very different purpose to SMF and has absolutely no plans to go in any way mainstream.
Pretty much the first major thing we did was start to tear out the template system as it currently is.
Why? Because the majority of people aren't PHP people. They're people who come from Node land, and are used to Handlebars templates. They even did a fair amount of the conversions away from PHP to Handlebars - and this is not perfect right now, but the bulk of it is done.
It means we simplify all the logic around templates as far as users are concerned. Modding gets simpler, because you can target the mod code so much more easily should you want to, because instead of navigating around the PHP syntax, you can just handle the HTML itself - which would have solved a lot of the 2.0.14 login problem without resorting to buffer manipulations had it been available.
We can and do reuse code without having to remember which template it's in and whether it's already been loaded. We're also going to refactor all the language stuff away so that's also easier to use.
And you know what helped? I work with Handlebars at work when I write Moodle stuff. You make the argument that it's all just PHP - but honestly, the minute you start intermixing JavaScript behaviours with it, you really want to simplify the logic. Templates with a real template engine help with that - and I got to reuse what I'd learned about writing templates for Moodle in my own stuff.
Rigidly sticking to the mindset of 'what we have is good enough' is a guarantee for stagnation. It *may* be true that what you have is best, but every argument I've seen here is deflection.
Why not actually *try* it? Why not actually play with a system that does templating this way and get a feel for how well it works or doesn't work, rather than writing it off based on hypothetical costs?
Yes, the conversion is a cost. It's also largely a one time cost you pay whenever the version after 2.1 is done, if it's done for that (which I'd recommend)
Your repeated arguments about barrier to entry are logical fallacies for one, elitist and arrogant for two, and for a third, I think you misunderstand the user base.
The average SMF admin isn't you. They're not developers. Scraping by on HTML is possibly the upper edge of the average admin's skill set. Making them jump through 1.5 languages (HTML/Handlebars) is definitely nicer than juggling PHP/HTML, and the reality is that you actually don't have to lose any flexibility if you don't want to.
Recent Posts
