A brief update on 2.0

[Grudge]

Since it's been six weeks since my last update on the progress of SMF 2.0 I thought I'd drop a very quick update on progress. The bad news (For SMF) is that in the last six weeks I've been on holiday for three weeks so I achieved practically nothing during this time period.

However, SMF is not developed by a team of one and I know Thantos has made some progress recently on some authentication stuff which is pretty neat. That aside the other good news is that my "working away from home" has reduced increasing the amount of time I have to spend on 2.0 and hence the last though weeks I have been working "hammer and tong" to close off a load of the remaining bugs on our Mantis bug tracker.

In the last two weeks we've gone from having over 220 bug reports down to less than 170 - and that doesn't take account of the new ones added so we've probably closed off close to 70 bugs - good progress I hope you'll agree. We're continuing to work through and fix all significant bugs in 2.0 so we can get a beta out to our Charter Members as soon as possible. Whilst hopefully no-one expects the first beta to be bug free we want it to be as good as possible - if only so we don't get hundreds of bugs reported by hundreds of testers!

On a personal note I have to say that the last few months have been quite slow for SMF 2.0 - but I'm really hoping to change that over the next 2-3 months. Fortunately the rest of the team have been working hard - for example Blocs recently made some fantastic changes to the mod and theme site and will hopefully soon resume his work on cleaning up the SMF templates (Semantic templates won't be ready for Beta 1 I'm afraid but they are being worked on). It's fantastic to work on a project with so many dedicated people. On an entirely random note I'm always impressed that the little indicator the team has showing how many Charter Member tickets in our helpdesk are awaiting a response is pretty much always at zero - a testiment to how hard our support guys work here no doubt (Currently 0/10!).

Not the most exciting post ever but I'm not a PR person The headline people are no doubt interested in though is that I am still shooting to get the Charter beta out this month - let's see what real life does to try scupper that

[Herman's Mixen]

it's very good too hear that the process is continue-ing... and making 2.0 as stable as it can be..
so we wait for the public release... when it comes out

[shadow82x]

We want a stable release and noticed some bug fixes. Very nice job take your time. We all want 2.0 but we want it to be stable.

[MPT.]

Nice..

[JoomlaJon]

I'll wait

Keep up the good work!

/jon

[metallica48423]

If you do notice bugs, please hit us up in Bug Reports so we can verify and/or debunk them and get the legitimate ones posted on the bug tracker

One of the advantages of running a private beta here is the ability to see how it works in a production environment.  People's help is appreciated when it comes to finding bugs, it'll make a much better SMF 2.0

[Efsane - Yorumcuyuz.NET]

THANKS

[Grudge]

Less than 150 bugs now so good progress... including fixing some long standing issues with the new upgrade script which is critical for our first beta release. The site upgrade chucked out a few new bugs (Since fixed) and things seem to be pretty stable here at the moment. Even the WYSIWYG editor is working much more like it should - and infact yesterday I made a few more updates to it that mean in "WYSIWYG mode" the buttons now highlight correctly as you move the cursor through next (i.e. it's not a simple hover like in "basic" mode).

Even managed to squeeze in a new feature in the last week.

[ApplianceJunk]

Even managed to squeeze in a new feature in the last week.

Awesome, your doing great!

Thanks,

[Thantos]

It should be noted that not all of the 140ish bugs open are related to 2.0

[shadow82x]

This is great news. I am seeing a lot of bug fixes in the test boards and the community.

[Nordoelum]

I hope version 2.0 will be a significant upgrade from 1.1.x

[metallica48423]

it is.

[christicehurst]

Looking forward to the feature where all themes will change when you install mods. I feel sorry for the poor guy who has 15 themes to change for every mod.

15 themes x 40 mods = 600 Edits

Meaning in english - I give up after Edit 24.

[Grudge]

Well it's not going to be fool proof (The mod/theme thing) but hopefully it will work in many instances. At the end of the day if a theme completely changes the code for a template no matter how clever we make the package manager we'll never get it to adapt the template correctly.

[Coldfx]

Well it's not going to be fool proof (The mod/theme thing) but hopefully it will work in many instances. At the end of the day if a theme completely changes the code for a template no matter how clever we make the package manager we'll never get it to adapt the template correctly.

I know this isn't the place for suggestions, but this is related to a suggestion of how you could fix the mod/theme problem - installing themes as mods.  Have it edit the default theme appropiately, or even make a copy of the current default theme files that need to be edited into a new folder, make the changes, and you're done.  Sure, it won't install perfect 100% of the time, which is why'd it be an option you could turn on or off.

[Dannii]

Installing themes as mods won't help anything.

[Coldfx]

Installing themes as mods won't help anything.

Meh :\  I figured if you had all mods installed before hand, and if the theme you had only did minor edits to the default theme to function, it could work..

[Dannii]

If the mods only do minor edits then they'll work the way Grudge and the other devs are working on.

[redone]

As Grudge said its a fair enhancement. With the simple fact that there are so many mods, so many themes this will always make it hard to deliver a solution that will work 100% of the time.

It will certainly make most users life's a lot easier.

[Thantos]

We are now under 130 bugs total.  I did some looking and we have 113 bugs that affect 2.0.  Out of those only 6 are marked as major or worse bugs.

In all honesty, we probably will release the beta with some known bugs.  However, they'll be the ones that will take us awhile to fix but don't have a huge impact on the forum.  For example, I have a bug that causes some weird redirection if you go to the ssi_examples page but forget the www in the url.  Not exactly something that is going to interfer with the forum operation.