Show Posts
2161
Announcements / Re: Status update, March 2014
« on: March 25, 2014, 08:21:57 PM »
I got some time to work on FES things this month, though I'll confess to have been working on interesting things rather than getting the bug tracker sorted. Soon, I promise.
What I've been working on instead is breaking up the forum codebase. Our current git-based source tracking works well for making changes and deploying, but it has major shortcomings when it comes to maintaining those changes against newer versions of SMF, as I found when I tried playing around with SMF 2.1 alpha.
My solution is to separate logically distinct parts of our changes. I've already worked out which git commits apply to the core SMF code and converted those into a set of quilt patches, and created new git repositories (currently private, but they will be on GitHub once we start using them) for the two themes we're maintaining, which will be separate to our SMF patches. This has numerous benefits, including improving the reusability of our code and the maintainability of our patches.
The final piece of the puzzle is static assets. There are a small number of assets which need to live on the same host as SMF itself for one reason or another, which will be tracked in their own git repository (this will stay private, as it will additionally contain Settings.php with the database password -- not strictly an asset, but it can be treated as one for the purposes of distribution). The remaining assets, including all theme images and CSS, smileys and avatars, will then be outsourced to Amazon S3 and served via CloudFlare, improving page load times and reducing the load on the server.
I'd also like to say that pizaaplanet has been doing a spectacular job of maintaining both Tintagel's FES theme and the Christmas theme in CN. I hadn't realised just how much time he'd put into those until I separated our change history, and I noticed I've been focused on fixing and improving SMF itself. Almost all of the maintenance that has gone into the forum theme in the past four months is pizaaplanet's doing.
What I've been working on instead is breaking up the forum codebase. Our current git-based source tracking works well for making changes and deploying, but it has major shortcomings when it comes to maintaining those changes against newer versions of SMF, as I found when I tried playing around with SMF 2.1 alpha.
My solution is to separate logically distinct parts of our changes. I've already worked out which git commits apply to the core SMF code and converted those into a set of quilt patches, and created new git repositories (currently private, but they will be on GitHub once we start using them) for the two themes we're maintaining, which will be separate to our SMF patches. This has numerous benefits, including improving the reusability of our code and the maintainability of our patches.
The final piece of the puzzle is static assets. There are a small number of assets which need to live on the same host as SMF itself for one reason or another, which will be tracked in their own git repository (this will stay private, as it will additionally contain Settings.php with the database password -- not strictly an asset, but it can be treated as one for the purposes of distribution). The remaining assets, including all theme images and CSS, smileys and avatars, will then be outsourced to Amazon S3 and served via CloudFlare, improving page load times and reducing the load on the server.
I'd also like to say that pizaaplanet has been doing a spectacular job of maintaining both Tintagel's FES theme and the Christmas theme in CN. I hadn't realised just how much time he'd put into those until I separated our change history, and I noticed I've been focused on fixing and improving SMF itself. Almost all of the maintenance that has gone into the forum theme in the past four months is pizaaplanet's doing.
