Very important questions concerning SMF - Please read

[Ertado]

I am about to create an extremely extensive modification of SMF and I need to know if I should do it on 1.1.8 (which I am very familiar with) or 2.0 (which is not completed yet).

Will I  be easy to translate a modification from SMF 1.1.8 to SMF 2?  If I modify SMF 2 right now at RC, will I be forced to redo everything when the updates come out?

This modification will involve altering many things in SMF's backend so I'm guessing the answers to my questions are no and yes respectively.

[Antechinus]

You have the right idea. Without knowing exactly what the mod involves it is impossible to predict how much revision it might need for future releases of 2.0. Some things will change and other things will be staying the same.

[Arantor]

First up, you should be updating to 1.1.10 for security patches.

It does depend how extensive the modifications are. As you may be aware, RC2 is due sometime soon which brings with it a whole new default theme, meaning that you should ideally await at least RC2 before trying to do any serious modding with it. RC3 will likely be bugfixes, not major changes.

If you're modifying the backend, you would be advised to familiarise yourself with the 2.0 database abstraction layer too, since db_query() no longer exists in 2.0.

[青山 素子]

To add another point, we plan to keep the 1.1 series supported for some time (unless we find a huge architectural issue that can't be easily patched), so we won't be abandoning you if you decide on 1.1 as your base.

Since 2.0 is in the RC phase, the core should be quite stable. The theme portion is still in a bit of flux, so you may have to change the code in that portion if you base on 2.0.