Rethinking blocks/widgets - more thoughts from other places

[Bloc]

Caching is helpful no doubt...but for some things - I am just plucking the ones i remember lol - like a shoutbox or even recent posts, cannot be cached for very long, to not fall behind. Other things may still need to be even more up-to-date, who knows. So its not certain that caching for the built-in ones will solve those problems. But again, just airing some thoughts here, after thinking about such issues for some odd years back lol.

In the end its actually not that important, SMF already does many things as opposed to a single query made by a single-purpose(or not) blog script etc. and adding more database calls does NOT make it much worse than other systems out there, rather the opposite. I have yet to discover systems that are as efficient and having same level of complexity in the most basic of CMS's. Its been tempting to just use SMF as a base rather than a framework or existing CMS..but it does require some major changing since you normally don't want boards/topics to be the main content types. Which in the end led to using other scripts instead...but objectively it was the better choice, at least in my small experience.

[Arantor]

True, shoutboxes had occurred to me - but there's that fine line between having the block system available in core, and having the full range of widgets to support it; I wouldn't envisage there being a shoutbox out of the box, but very possible with any sensible framework.