Announcing the start of SMF 3.0 development

[live627]

Cool! Maybe we can implement such a structure in a future version once those newer browsers are more widely deployed.

[Arantor]

Adding a preprocessor isn't that hard. The trick is actually splitting up the theme sanely.

But then you get to pass variables in from admin without juggling things oddly - it becomes possible to do things like upload new fonts to the admin and have them be available in the editor and in posts.

The other benefit is that you can have multiple files and assemble them into a single source to send to the user.

[Julius_2000]

CSS now has native support for &, no preprocessor.  But it's 2023 new, so fairly new support in browsers. https://caniuse.com/css-nesting https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Nesting_selector

Cool! Maybe we can implement such a structure in a future version once those newer browsers are more widely deployed.

Yeah, that was my reasoning for asking. Last year FF enabled nesting natively and I started to test it and it worked great.

[Bugo]

[Diego Andrés]

Some of those are already in the Theme PR, definitely looking forward to other features we could utilize once the theme it's more polished.

[TaGBaN]

Just confirming because SMF is widely used for forums where they're geared towards older generation computers (ones that for instance don't support HTTPS, or CSS/Java). Will 3.0 support that endeavor? I assume most if not all of the changes I'm concerned about are at the theme level, and not the core level.

[Sesquipedalian]

Just confirming because SMF is widely used for forums where they're geared towards older generation computers (ones that for instance don't support HTTPS, or CSS/Java). Will 3.0 support that endeavor? I assume most if not all of the changes I'm concerned about are at the theme level, and not the core level.

Since the release of SMF 2.1, our client-side requirements have been as follows:

Any web browser that supports HTML5 and CSS3 and that is still supported by its vendor.

We currently have no plans to change that in SMF 3.0. If our client-side requirements do change before SMF 3.0 is released, we will make that information known.

[Arantor]

Just confirming because SMF is widely used for forums where they're geared towards older generation computers (ones that for instance don't support HTTPS, or CSS/Java). Will 3.0 support that endeavor? I assume most if not all of the changes I'm concerned about are at the theme level, and not the core level.

Failure to support HTTPS at this point in time is doing your users a disservice.

If running on HTTP only, you are putting your users at risk by the fact their password is transmitted unprotected. (2.0 used to try to protect users without HTTPS by way of using client side hashing, this is no longer done in 2.1 because the password hashing scheme is vastly more complex now.)

[live627]

older generation computers (ones that for instance don't support HTTPS, or CSS/Java).

Old text-based computers from 30 years ago and modern software mix just as well as oil and water; or, not at all.

[jsx]

Very good news. So, as I understand it, SMF 2.1 will be released for e.g. SMF 2.1.10 and that's it, and then SMF 3.0 comes in? And why is SMF 3.0 development now faster than SMF 2.1? I see it on github.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

As always, I don't really like to predict too far in to the future.
3.0 will be ready when it's ready and generally releasing a new major version has not meant that work on the immediately previous version just completely stops. It may, and probably will, limit how much resources is put in to it, but it most likely does not mean that 2.1 is completely abandoned.

[Kindred]

as for being faster than 2.1 -- if you read the developers' blog posts, you'll understand.

[jsx]

as for being faster than 2.1 -- if you read the developers' blog posts, you'll understand.

Can you give me a link to this blog?

[Diego Andrés]

Can you give me a link to this blog?

It's this board you're in.
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?board=129.0

2.1 had several topics over a long period of time.

[spiros]

I remember reading ages ago that SMF 3 was supposed to use a framework like Symfony, has that idea been dropped somewhere along the road?

[Sesquipedalian]

That not part of the plan, no.

[live627]

I've never even used one.

[Tyrsson]

I've never even used one.

You should definitely try one some time.