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RC1 is no longer miles away!
Posted by Aäron on January 24, 2009, 06:23:10 PM
Hey everyone,
It has certainly been quite a while since a developer last posted a blog entry here. Rest assured, the development of SMF hasn't stalled at all. While it is unfortunately true that a few developers have left, the remaining lot haven't given up hope on the project! We have actually been working together to get RC1 out!
In fact, over 314 entries have been added to the changelog since the release of beta 4 public in September last year; 33.8% of them have even been added in January this year. This effectively means that a lot of bugs were squashed in about four months time.
And it gets even better. RC1 is no longer miles away; in fact, our charter members have had access to a preview of RC1 for almost a week now. We're ironing out the last blocking bugs and hope to release it to the public shortly.
While statistics may appeal to some of you, I expect most of you like to hear solid facts instead. For those of you, I've compiled a short list with the changes to look forward to.
A new, improved profile template
That's right, we changed it, at long last. If you really can't wait, have a look at the profile section on this site.
Improved administration centre areas
While we all agreed the new administration centre is a definite improvement, we thought certain areas could do with some improvement. Among the changed areas are the forum maintenance, server settings, core features and the languages areas.
Better multilingual support for modifications
As most modifications only modify the English language files, this generally caused a lot of confusion for users using other languages on their forums. SMF 2.0 RC1 contains improvements that'll hopefully make this a problem of the past.
Lots of bugfixes
As you'd expect from a supposedly more stable version, it fixes a lot of the bugs that may or may not have haunted your life as an end-user or mod developer. This includes issues with the semantic version of our default theme.
So, what does this all mean? It means SMF 2.0 RC1 will be out soon. I cannot state an exact date, but it's definitely soon enough to be looking forward to.
Aaron
It has certainly been quite a while since a developer last posted a blog entry here. Rest assured, the development of SMF hasn't stalled at all. While it is unfortunately true that a few developers have left, the remaining lot haven't given up hope on the project! We have actually been working together to get RC1 out!
In fact, over 314 entries have been added to the changelog since the release of beta 4 public in September last year; 33.8% of them have even been added in January this year. This effectively means that a lot of bugs were squashed in about four months time.
And it gets even better. RC1 is no longer miles away; in fact, our charter members have had access to a preview of RC1 for almost a week now. We're ironing out the last blocking bugs and hope to release it to the public shortly.
While statistics may appeal to some of you, I expect most of you like to hear solid facts instead. For those of you, I've compiled a short list with the changes to look forward to.
A new, improved profile template
That's right, we changed it, at long last. If you really can't wait, have a look at the profile section on this site.
Improved administration centre areas
While we all agreed the new administration centre is a definite improvement, we thought certain areas could do with some improvement. Among the changed areas are the forum maintenance, server settings, core features and the languages areas.
Better multilingual support for modifications
As most modifications only modify the English language files, this generally caused a lot of confusion for users using other languages on their forums. SMF 2.0 RC1 contains improvements that'll hopefully make this a problem of the past.
Lots of bugfixes
As you'd expect from a supposedly more stable version, it fixes a lot of the bugs that may or may not have haunted your life as an end-user or mod developer. This includes issues with the semantic version of our default theme.
So, what does this all mean? It means SMF 2.0 RC1 will be out soon. I cannot state an exact date, but it's definitely soon enough to be looking forward to.
Aaron
Well I hope it gets released today or tomorrow.
Quick question, witch developers left?
-.-
nuff said
I actually laughed aloud to that one!!
Keep up the good work Devs!! And great work so far
Oh and thanks for the good news.
Will the upgrading/updating after RC1 be abled to be made through the adminpanel/package manager, so we don't have to upload/download patches.
I know, i'm lazy. I don't like uploading/downloading stuff back and forth.
I believe the patches start with final versions. There will likely be too many changes and bugfixes to generate an update package. Update packages are meant to be for minor updates, not major updates involving a lot of changes
Thanks for the clarification. Hopefully the road to gold will be a little more expedient now that RC1 is almost here.
A mile is 1/186,282 of a second. So it should be here by the time you read this post : )
Why? I would if I were just a charter LOL
But you were very crafty with your words
http://www.simplemachines.org/about/team.php
wasnt their always 4
The release date is any time between the time of this post and the actual time of release, when is that? No one knows, guess we'll have to be patient
(always coming but never here, not literally tomorrow
Does SMF2 have:
* WYSIWYG posts?
* Auto-backup plug ins or new core auto-backup that emails the backup to you?
* RC1 themes that also work when it "goes Gold"? Or will themes possibly need a total overhaul when upgrading to Gold? What does upgrading to Gold mean?
* Easier CSS templates or theme modification, more CSS based?
Now I'm suddenly all excited about SMF 2 ... I thought it was going to be light-years away.
2) Auto-backups - No? There is always room for a plug-in's.
3) Themes from SMF2.0 RC1 will probably need to be updated to work with final.
4) Yes many more things are CSS based.
SMF 2.0 RC1 templates won't probably work with SMF 2.0 Final. They might work, it depends on changes made to templates and CSS.
Is there a way to load a "package" of say 6-10 files into Dreamweaver just for styling purposes? Say a dummy template set up so that it "looks" like SMF 2 and then maybe just 1 or 2 CSS files to edit (with accompanying images to copy across to image folders, etc)?
If it was in Dreamweaver, I might have a hope of understanding how to style. My wife is a professional "blue chip" graphic designer, but we mainly concentrate on print. I'm just beginning to learn CSS and am pretty bad at the "back end" side of things. I find editing XHTML files interspersed with php quite frightening.
If I had just a few CSS files to edit in DW, I might be able to get my head around it all and offer a few clean "designer" themes... but as it is, our design is lightyears ahead of our ability in backend / web stuff. Any ideas?
You will be able to do a lot with just css though. Loading them would be a matter of selecting the ones you want to load. Standard operating procedure. Why would they need to be in a package?
The whole point is that I'm not that comfortable with CSS yet, and can't just "think in code". I need a few content pages that "mimic" the content of the forum so that I can modify the CSS in dreamweaver and see it as I go.
It would be awesome to just have a nice, clean, user-friendly template that had say an easy header plug-in at the very least. If I were running SMF, I'd even have such a thing core.
EG: 3 basic core themes with different but easy WYSIWIG modifying, and plug ins for uploading very specific headers. (EG: The "Professional-basic" header must be 770 pixels wide and can have a height between 70 and 100. Upload HERE) and then the widget uploads it to the right spot, so that even total newbies can do it.
But I'm not a php or programmer guy, so I'm all hot air and ideals, not in the real world I guess.
Like I said, local hosts (server on your desktop for testing) are great.
Anyway yes, you could add umpteen features to make editing mindless but it isn't going to happen with SMF. There are plenty of custom themes around and minor changes really aren't hard. Even complete beginners manage them fairly well as long as they get a bit of advice.
Also, I meant Web Dev... the CSS editor rocks (apart from omitting background images). Also the find DIV / block elements etc... it's all good.
While learning Joomla or CSS on Lynda.com, they constantly RAVE about Firefox's Web Dev.
I just can say: "wow!"
(Anyway, it's a bit off this thread topic so if you have a comment please answer at link above).
Did I ask if WYSIWYG posting will be a part of RC1?
Anyone see this comparison at forum matrix before?
http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/MyBB+SMF
I've seen forum matrix's comparison before
I can attest to the truth of this. I had never touched CSS or PHP before about a week ago and I have been able to do some reasonably significant manual tweaking. This http://gregnmary.gotdns.com:8080 started out as Arron's Bright Forest theme and I, as an absolute noob was able to fumble through getting it to look and act how my wife wanted though it's still a work in progress.
What he's saying is exactly how I've been doing it. Keep backups of the files and if I blow anything up I just copy the old one back and play some more.
BTW, I'm using KATE on the same Linux box the forum is running on.
Wow there was a beta 1?
I came in at 3, then 3.1
I knew it!!
Suuuuurrree!!!
Lastly, how hard would it be for me to "theme" the Notify button to "subscribe / unsubscribe" toggle? What would that involve? Some php? (Starts biting nails....
Do support staff do stuff like this for Charter Members?
Can wait..
so... when's it coming out? ;-)
When it's ready.
SMF - the duke nukem among forum software
Avatar related
wow!! I will have a lot of fun with SMF 2.0
I would NOT recommend EA Store support
SMF gets to your addiction quicker
It will released before 2.0 Final
Anyways... I guess next time developers post something like this we know its like 5 days away XD
Very nice, and smf 2.0 final?
You didn´t gave more news about the project, it is still on?
And may is also the 5th month of the year, there's 7 more left.
2.0 RC1 was released months ago, actually.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=310301.0
Thats how our versioning works. Beta 1 through 4, RC1, RC2, RC3?, RC4?
The only reason we had RC1-1 was to patch security issues. We don't usually do a dashed version.
Eg we do not do RC1-1, RC1-2, RC1-3
Thankfully we have a 1.1.9 backup still so once I find a suitable theme (if there is one) then I will be going back to 1.1.9
Funny how many sites are using it now and how long has it been around? Several years I was told.
All 3 of the tech staff recommended an upgrade so...
Exactly. We do RC1.1 or RC1.2 or RC1.3
It would certainly be much more efficient than posting off-color remarks that are more likely to anger someone than help fix any problems that might be legitimate issues. Otherwise, all we know is what we find in testing and what's reported to us. I've personally been using 2.0 since the early alpha stage and have had relatively few problems even from that early stage.
So please, let us know.
It's getting to be that the only way you can play by the rules is to not use mods... one of SMF's biggest strengths (and one of the reasons I went with SMF over the other options). It's like, either live with the buggy mods or live with the buggy SMF2.
I don't bring this up to pressure the SMF development team at all... I understand things take time. I've done software development myself. It's just a statement of fact... and more of a frustration with the mod developers than anything. This transitional period is a rough and difficult one to ride through for those of us running sites.
I realize that. I'm just providing the SMF team feedback of the "state of the union", so to speak, from the trenches of a lowly SMF user. While the SMF team can't control mod authors, the culture of SMF being a powerful system because of mods implies the expectation that you're going to use them... so how well that dynamic is working is important information to know, in my opinion.
I'm right now faced with 2 rather important mods (for my forum) that aren't working properly. I'm not naming names in this thread as it isn't the appropriate place... but the feedback from both was basically that they're only working on the 2.0 versions now, no more development is taking place on the 1.x versions, regardless of bugs. It's very frustrating.
Look at my two forums. I customise them to pieces, simply because I can and I like to mess with things. But I USE them, and I'm very active in using them.
Also, I find it frustrating when mod authors WONT upgrade their mod for 2.0, like the drafts mod... I could REALLY use that. It works all ways, and mod authors are getting a lot of pressure over it all
I've made a few of my own mods, and I support all versions and bug fix when needed