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  • Steve Machol
    Former Customer Support Manager
    • Jul 2000
    • 154488

    Developer Chat

    Here is the chat room:

    <iframe src="http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php/option=com_altcaster/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=d18466561c/height=550/width=470" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="550" scrolling="no" width="470"><a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;altcast_code=d18466561c" >VB Developer Chat #1</a></iframe>
    Steve Machol, former vBulletin Customer Support Manager (and NOT retired!)
    Change CKEditor Colors to Match Style (for 4.1.4 and above)

    Steve Machol Photography


    Mankind is the only creature smart enough to know its own history, and dumb enough to ignore it.


  • Steve Machol
    Former Customer Support Manager
    • Jul 2000
    • 154488

    #2
    Here is the log of this Dev Chat:

    [3:57] Joe Rosenbum: Greetings!
    [3:57] Joe Rosenbum: We'll be beginning here in just a few minutes
    [3:58] Joe Rosenbum: thanks everyone for all the great questions
    [3:58] Comment From zlib: Good day
    [3:58] Kevin Sours: Good afternoon, evening, morning, whichever the case may be.
    [3:58] Joe Rosenbum: So, before we begin....
    [3:58] Comment From Dan Wragg: Hi guys
    [3:59] Michael Henretty: Hello everyone
    [4:00] Joe Rosenbum: Let me introduce Kevin Sours, who is the lead developer on vBulletin. Kevin came to Internet Brands for nearly four years. He has been working with vBulletin since 2002, and his first role at IB was leading development on our Travel properties, many of which are large VB forums like FlyerTalk.
    [4:00] Joe Rosenbum: whoops
    [4:01] Joe Rosenbum: sorry about the grammar and spelling mistakes, I'm trying to type fast
    [4:01] Joe Rosenbum: in any case, Kevin is a powerhouse developer with tons of experience with VB
    [4:01] Comment From SecondV: Howdy
    [4:01] Kevin Sours: Hey guys good to see you all here.
    [4:01] Comment From Dody: Hey All developers, I am glad for this chat session, looking forward..
    [4:01] Andrew: Hello all
    [4:01] Joe Rosenbum: Also, this is a moderated chat
    [4:02] Chris: ( Practical Note to everyone: this room is in the IRC-equivalent of "mode +m" - Admins can see what you're posting in a separate console, and we can "inject" your messages in the conversation stream with the click of a button. So don't fret if your messages don't show-up.)
    [4:02] Joe Rosenbum: We'll try to post your comments inline as we are able
    [4:02] Comment From Green Cat: Good Evening Kevin
    [4:02] Joe Rosenbum: but please be patient with us
    [4:02] Joe Rosenbum: ok, so you've all asked some great questions, here's the highest rated:
    [4:02] Joe Rosenbum: VB Nexus
    [4:03] Kevin Sours: It doesn't out of the box.
    [4:03] Kevin Sours: However joe posted the link to a plugin we developed in house to handle it.
    [4:03] Comment From Sockwater: Hello everyone.
    [4:03] Kevin Sours: That's writtend for 3.8, but we intend to update it to work with 4.0
    [4:03] Comment From Trevster: Evening all!
    [4:04] Comment From cellarius: Good evening everyone
    [4:04] Comment From Trevor Hannant: Is Nexus likely to make it into a future feature release Kevin?
    [4:04] Comment From Hal9000: hi dev. cover it live is an excellent choice
    [4:04] Kevin Sours: We'd like to. Its a good feature and I see a lot of use for it.
    [4:06] Comment From Hal9000: so vb nexus is an official supported plugin ?
    [4:06] Comment From Dody: Is it planned to extend VB Nexus to support extra logins, such like OpenID (OpenID is not supported yet)
    [4:06] Chris: (Aside: The guys who run our many vBulletin Automotive Enthusiast forums are also the most prolific vBulletin extenders/modders within Internet Brands - largely due to the fact that they manage many many sites, some of which are among the most trafficked vBulletin sites in the World. They're working very closely with Kevin Sours and his team. vBNexus is one of the many products they've built, many others we've not yet released.)
    [4:06] Kevin Sours: Re: VB nexus. Not at the moment, but it is written by internet brands and we use it on our own sites.
    [4:07]
    [4:07] Kevin Sours: Mobile browsers are something we have our eye on. We've developed a mobile friendly style for 4.0 internally here and we hope to be able to ship that in the future.
    [4:07] Joe Rosenbum: That image is FlyerTalk (an Internet Brands site) running a mobile theme
    [4:07]
    [4:08] Joe Rosenbum: that's an inline moderation view of FlyerTalk mobile
    [4:08] Kevin Sours: I expect tighter integration as we go forwards.
    [4:08]
    [4:08] Joe Rosenbum: That's High Def Digest, another Internet Brands site
    [4:08]
    [4:09] Comment From Tony Williams: Great news, i have a Android G1, will make mobile browsing so much better
    [4:09] Joe Rosenbum: btw: I'm skipping a lot of questions that are very product focused as opposed to developer focused
    [4:10] Chris: As a vB4 license holder, you get all future updates within the 4 series.
    [4:10] Comment From Mert Gokceimam: Are these styles build for iphone or will they work with blackberry and other mobile phones ?
    [4:11] Comment From King Kovifor: There will be a transcript of this chat, correct?
    [4:11] Joe Rosenbum: @Mert we're targeting major mobile browsers to begin: iPhone/WebKit, current BlackBerries, Opera
    [4:12] Kevin Sours: Some of that will depend on context. The CMS is heavily cached so the average query count should be below that. With a cold cache the number of queries can be over 100 when the page has a number of widgets. Our testing so far doesn't indicate that there is a performance problem as a result.
    [4:12] Joe Rosenbum: @King_Kovifor yes the transcript will be available
    [4:12] Comment From Lynne: I would think so in the new Dev Chat forum.
    [4:14] Kevin Sours: Yes, yes, and yes. We have a lot of ideas in mind which will probably go out the windown once we hear about your ideas. We also hope to make it easy for 3rd party developers to create their own content types.
    [4:15] Comment From Chris Dildy: can you explain content types?
    [4:15] Kevin Sours: We haven't done that much with memcache. I'd like to do more. I'm a big fan of memchache and think we could be doing a lot more with it.
    [4:16] Wayne Luke: Articles, Threads, Blog Entries, Social Group Discussions are all content types.
    [4:16] Kevin Sours: Content types are a new concept that allow us to build systems that handle various items generically.
    [4:17] Kevin Sours: The new attachment system uses them so we can have one attachment manager that works with any type of data that can use attachments.
    [4:17] Kevin Sours: The search system uses them. The tag system.
    [4:17] Comment From Dody: Kevin, Is it possible to code our own content type like the widgets example you showed us, will this be supported in 4.0?
    [4:17] Comment From Shawn Hogan: +1 more memcache
    [4:18] Kevin Sours: It probably isn't as easy as it should be right now, but I suspect that many of you will figure it out -- whether or not we tell you you can.
    [4:19] Kevin Sours: I can't speak to the support policy, but you should be able to manage it through the product system, so I can't see it being any less supported then current extension.
    [4:20] Comment From Anseur: So, you could use the content types in other, future suite features or other applications, I assume?
    [4:21] Kevin Sours: We won't do it prior to the upgrade, but there are plans to disable old products as part of the upgrade to avoid breaking the board. We don't plan to clean up any datamodel changes make by the mods.
    [4:22] Wayne Luke: There are tools at vBulletin.org to compare your database to a clean vBulletin setup and determine what to remove.
    [4:22] Kevin Sours: @Anseur. Definitely its part of our goal to centralize functionality going forward so that, among other things, features in one part of the system will work the same as features in the rest of the system.
    [4:22] Comment From Shawn Hogan: Are we still on track for a mid-November public beta? Chomping at the bit to get starting porting my plug-ins.
    [4:22] Joe Rosenbum: @Shawn Hogan yes
    [4:23] Joe Rosenbum: Barry Chertov asks: "Has the plugin system been extended? I think every SQL statement should be able to be modified via a plugin and MANY more hooks should be provided. Simple logic tests for the existence of hook code take essentially no time!"
    [4:24] Comment From Caolan McGrath: Will there be an email sent out or an Announcement/Admin CP Announcement alerting us?
    [4:24] Joe Rosenbum: @Caolan -- we'll make an announcement or otherwise try to get the word out
    [4:25] Comment From Hal9000: a twitter account will help a lot
    [4:25] Kevin Sours: At the moment the plugin system hasn't changed that much. Some hooks have changed as the code they are called in has changed. We hope to focus on the hook system in a later release and really do some major improvements.
    [4:26] Wayne Luke: twitter account is @vbulletin4
    [4:26] Joe Rosenbum: Dean asks: "Can you explicitly talk about the MVC architecture you have developed for vB4. vBulletin has always had a fairly good model implementation, and an (arguably) reasonable template engine but a non-existant controller. What has been done to change this?"
    [4:28] Kevin Sours: We've done a lot of work on the view layer, particularly in terms of seperating it from the rest of the code. We're no longer pulling the variables from whatever scope the template is eval'ed in.
    [4:29] Comment From Cole: How long will it take for IB to complete a transition to the new MVC architecture? I would imagine a gradual transition would be very messy, especially in terms of plugin development.
    [4:29] Chris: (Aside: always keep an eye out on the vBulletin Announcements Forum listed at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/ for latest news/updates. Also http://twitter.com/vbulletin4 may relay some of those announcements)
    [4:29] Kevin Sours: We've done some work on cms towards getting a controller set up, but we've got some more work to do there and we need to get the rest of the site transitioned.
    [4:31] Kevin Sours: @Cole. I don't know for sure. Software development can be an imprecise business. We intend to do the work over the 4.x series.
    [4:31] Kevin Sours: We have a sphinx search working in house here at IB. Its not yet ready to release to the wild, but we do have plans to clean it up and get it out there in some form.
    [4:32] Kevin Sours: One of the major goals of 4.0 was to make search pluggable.
    [4:33] Comment From Chris Dildy: Has the template system changed much from 3.8.x? Will vBulletin focus on more CSS validation for the default style?
    [4:34] Comment From King Kovifor: On a side note from a developer in the alpha - I've started getting one of my custom mods plugged into the search, and its not overly difficult. I know at least 1 developer had it working within a few days.
    [4:34] Kevin Sours: Its changed a lot. There is new template markup and a new way of calling templates in the code -- fetch_templates is gone.
    [4:36] Kevin Sours: The goal was to get eval out every code file so we can, hopefully, look at other mechanisms in the future to rendering the templates.
    [4:36] Comment From pod: Will those changes be documented for the modding community?
    [4:36] Comment From King Kovifor: Again: From a plugin developers point of view - the new system has been relatively easy to catch onto and convert the instances from fetch_template to the new method.
    [4:37] Kevin Sours: A little of column A and a little of column B. The template system is totally new and templates aren't going to work. Most of the hooks won't be affected and so a lot of things coded for the forum will continue to work with a few changes.
    [4:37] Kevin Sours: I believe that there is some documentation for the template system in the works.
    [4:39] Comment From cellarius: Some members of the alpha test group already have started writing articles on .org, among them a guide to converting modifications.
    [4:39] Comment From Lynne: Just seconding what King Kovifor said - it really isn't that hard to convert once you understand what the changes were and the new syntax. Also, we will all be around to help each other out in converting.
    [4:39] Comment From wilhelm: I would love to see a very simple, powerful, standard compliant api to expose vB's functionality in more programatic ways, and make use of rpc to really make it easy to integrate vb's sites to other ecosystems. MVC is okay, but unuseful without an API to manage forums, users, data, etc. Any more advancements there than what had been done with the data managers?
    [4:40] Comment From Caolan McGrath: Will there be any more of these developer chats at any time? As I have to leave right now and will miss the rest.
    [4:40] Joe Rosenbum: @Caolan -- we'll be keeping the transcript up, and we're planning on doing this regularly
    [4:41] Kevin Sours: So would I. This is the goal that we are working towards, but with a mature product like vBulletin -- especially one with so many features -- you have to be careful you approach it.
    [4:41] Comment From jorgeavc: ok, we know many of here are developers and many designers, but in your personal opinion, in terms of easynes, in a scale from 1 to 10, how hard do you think is skinning for vb4 and how hard it was for vb3.x
    [4:42] Kevin Sours: We haven't done much to change the phrasing system.
    [4:42] Chris: @Chris Dildy: We're focusing primary on XHTML Validation, while CSS validation is more of a gray area, especially in light of various browser-specific extensions we're using for rounded corners, and some of the "underscore hacks" we've had to inject in the CSS for IE6 - Those throw a lot of noise when validating a stylesheet. With this said, we'll be cleaning-up as much of it as possible throughout the Beta period. And this is something we can continually improve on.
    [4:43] Comment From King Kovifor: I believe an API should expose basics: Users, Forums, Threads, Posts, Blogs, CMS Articles, and have "BASIC" account management -- say, update user title, etc. And -- Allow for account creation via the API for easy "multi-site" registration.
    [4:44] Joe Rosenbum: CMS Add Article
    [4:44] Joe Rosenbum: CMS Read Me
    [4:44] Kevin Sours: @jorgeavc. I'm not a web designer so I'm probably not the best person to ask the question. Not to mention that its really hard to judge the difficulty of something you learned by building. I know we had our tech writer do some fairly nifty things just by playing with the new stylevars.
    [4:45] Comment From Renis: Are the old (3.8.x) language files compatible with vb4?
    [4:46] Wayne Luke: @Renis - Yes. You will however have to translate new phrases.
    [4:46] Kevin Sours: Yes and no. We've added a ton of phrases and had to change a few here and there. But the format is exactly the same and the bulk of the phrases should be fine as is.
    [4:48] Comment From chirs: How long will 4.1 be and will there be a new admin cp
    [4:48] Comment From Dan Wragg: have we got the roadmap yet?
    [4:49] Kevin Sours: We don't have a date for the 4.1 release, but the admincp is high on the list of things we want to address in the 4 series.
    [4:50] Comment From John: What's the plan with the Project Tools, when will we see it being released to vb.org and under what licence?
    [4:51] Comment From Sockwater: Will Project Tools be released simultaneously with vB4?
    [4:51] Kevin Sours: We do intend to release that to vb.org in the new few months. The license hasn't been determined, but it will be an Open Source license of some variety.
    [4:52] Kevin Sours: The roadmap is coming soon.
    [4:52] Comment From King Kovifor: With it being an open source license, will developers be able to contribute code and expand functionality, and fix bugs?
    [4:53] Kevin Sours: Yes
    [4:53] Kevin Sours: Sorry guys, I'm getting some lag here.
    [4:54] Comment From King Kovifor: That's good to know (if Kevin replied to me), especially as I feel the PT is lacking in several areas and can be improved on with a few key features. I believe most have been suggested, but not sure.
    [4:54] Chris: Aside: Here's another useful Blog Post by Don Kuramura about CMS: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entry...381-CMS-Update
    [4:54] Comment From Dan Wragg: Are we far away from BETA 3? and will BETA three be the first release to us customers?
    [4:55] Chris: Dan: No. Yes.
    [4:55] Comment From Jorge: Is the MVC rewrite going to be accomplished in v4 or in v5?
    [4:55] Kevin Sours: Yes, we plan to let the community run with PT.
    [4:55] Ray Morgan: @Dan - yes, B3 will be the first released to customers, and we are targeting having it released by the end of this week.
    [4:56] Comment From Anseur: Nice Ray.
    [4:56] Comment From seba kerckhof: VB 4 has run largely out of it's originally planned schedule, but what timeframe do you guys want to go to for next iterations in the 4 series? And what development process will be used to achieve that?
    [4:57] Comment From Dan Wragg: @Ray - that's great news, I can't wait to get started, seems it's imminent!
    [4:57] Comment From King Kovifor: @Kevin - I'm glad to know that we can "run" wild. Will there be any developer resources, official "release schedule", code submission guidelines, "global" repository for global storage, bug tracker? Also, how would "releases" be managed?
    [4:57] Comment From FloridaGuy: woot u could end the chat with that comment ray
    [4:57] Comment From Green Cat: Thanks Ray, really filling eager to start porting over my mods
    [4:57] Comment From Jorge: Will the PT license be one that allows it to be bundled within a commercial application?
    [4:58] Ray Morgan: @seba - the schedule extension was largely in response to customer feedback and was in order to beef up the CMS - from what we're hearing, the extra time has been worth the wait.
    [4:58] Kevin Sours: None of that's been decided. Right now the focus is getting vB4 shipped.
    [4:58] Comment From Feldon: No offense to GPL but I would suggest a different license for Project Tools.
    [4:58] Comment From Guest: Thanks to Ray and the vB team for all the hard work they are doing to bring us a great product. And thanks for all you are doing to keep us informed!
    [4:59] Ray Morgan: Thanks all!
    Steve Machol, former vBulletin Customer Support Manager (and NOT retired!)
    Change CKEditor Colors to Match Style (for 4.1.4 and above)

    Steve Machol Photography


    Mankind is the only creature smart enough to know its own history, and dumb enough to ignore it.


    Comment

    • Wayne Luke
      vBulletin Technical Support Lead
      • Aug 2000
      • 73979

      #3
      A German translation is available at www.vbulletin-germany.com.

      Link is here: http://www.vbulletin-germany.com/forum/blog.php?b=225
      Translations provided by Google.

      Wayne Luke
      The Rabid Badger - a vBulletin Cloud demonstration site.
      vBulletin 5 API

      Comment

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