Well that's obviously true. But why should they? Just releasing source code to the public doesn't include a duty to answer any question. That wasn't my point. I'm just totally perplex that a company making money by offering software as a service, dares to present their customers an editor which regularly makes my browser groan.
Actually I'm on The Sims forum, who are powered by the cloud vanilla, and they use advanced editor. Rich Editor is flawed in too many way but, as you said, performance is really bad.
And should they at least update a software that makes their brand visible over the internet ? Yes of course. They are more oss vanilla install than cloud ones. And they all link to vanillaforums.com where the only mention to the open source plateform is on the footer (and that's great, I've got no problem with that).
And on the other hand, many people that are not from the vanilla team did help the developpement of the cloud one (because the cloud one is still based off the open source one). So I think they really could at least show interest into a community that help them. Not by providing support, but at least provide updates to their software.
Web apps have become so complicated. I was looing at Google App Engine and it requires you create a YAML file and a composer.json file and running.
It took me a good long time to understand the whole process that composer will bring down some common libraries so that you app can function easier.. IE an add on to access Google Cloud Storage easily instead of having to code it yourself. I get that this makes a dev's life simpler to just build the app and bring down the includes but it makes understanding what's going on so much harder for newbies. I'm a hobbyist programmer and started with CGI back in the dial up days lol. I have been finding the cost of entry for programming has jumped dramatically. You have to understand like 10 things just to program, you need a local dev environment, with LAMP or WAMP so that is 4 things you need to know. Understanding GitHub repositories, understanding composer, understanding what a yaml file is for.
Haha it has been a learning curve for sure to understand all this new stuff when before I was just used to uploading files to the FTP and that's it!! Mind you when compiling an app for Google App Engine it takes like 15 minutes even for a single file app so I understand the need to test it and debug it locally so that each code change does not take 15 each time.
I am going to attempt the master branch build just so I understand the process and learn from it. But just to clarify if I have an existing 3.3 forum. I have it running locally on WAMP no issues. I can try setting up master branch to run it all by itself on my local machine and lets say i get it to work. How do I update 3.3 to 4? I still seem to be confused how to do this
In general it should be enough to copy the version 4 files to the version 3 installation. After that you should delete the files in the cache folder. Visit /utility/update and that's it.
The most safe approach is
to install a clean version
copy the /uploads folder from old forum to new forum
copy all your custom plugins and themes to the new installation
copy all relevant config settings from config.php (this can be tedious)
test, test, test
lock your live forum
copy all uploaded files again
change new configs database setting to point to the live database
run /utility/update
change your webserver to serve your forum from the new installation
This way you will never have orphan files. No need to stick exactly to that steps above, I think you got the idea.
I like the step by step this makes sense to me. One question I have is how do I get the MySQL data from the old forum to the new forum? Did the database structure not change from 3.3 to 4? if so is there a tool that imports that data from the old structure to the new structure? Or did it not change?
There is not only /utility/update but also /utility/structure. That will check if the database structure needs to be changed. But it should be part of the /utility/update process. But just to be sure, when I do an upgrade I run /utility/update several times and after that /utility/structure also several times. /utility/structure will always show three messages by the way. It's just the way the check is implemented which makes them being shown again and again. They can be ignored.
Composer is a bless. It's great to have a list of libraries available at packagist.org and being able to install them with a simple composer require eierlegende-wollmilchsau.
All those other build tools in the JavaScript eco system are way beyond my understanding. People do not write JavaScript, but TypeScript, but that needs to be compiled to JavaScript. And people like to use some new JavaScript standard features which aren't supported in all browsers. So they use "ES6" features, which need to be downgraded magically. And JavaScript files should certainly be minified. CSS can be more efficiently written in SASS, SCSS, LESS, WHATEVER, but that also requires a compilitation step. And certainly they should be minified, too. So there are uncountable tools. Because that is so confusing, people invent more and more "simpler" tools so that it gets even more complicated. Believe me: composer is a bless in many aspects ;-)
Comments
@R_J : But since they left us with the bitchy "Rich" Editor, I can't imagine that anybody cares about minor glitches...
I think that no one in the Vanilla team care of the open source variant...
Well that's obviously true. But why should they? Just releasing source code to the public doesn't include a duty to answer any question. That wasn't my point. I'm just totally perplex that a company making money by offering software as a service, dares to present their customers an editor which regularly makes my browser groan.
Actually I'm on The Sims forum, who are powered by the cloud vanilla, and they use advanced editor. Rich Editor is flawed in too many way but, as you said, performance is really bad.
And should they at least update a software that makes their brand visible over the internet ? Yes of course. They are more oss vanilla install than cloud ones. And they all link to vanillaforums.com where the only mention to the open source plateform is on the footer (and that's great, I've got no problem with that).
And on the other hand, many people that are not from the vanilla team did help the developpement of the cloud one (because the cloud one is still based off the open source one). So I think they really could at least show interest into a community that help them. Not by providing support, but at least provide updates to their software.
Web apps have become so complicated. I was looing at Google App Engine and it requires you create a YAML file and a composer.json file and running.
It took me a good long time to understand the whole process that composer will bring down some common libraries so that you app can function easier.. IE an add on to access Google Cloud Storage easily instead of having to code it yourself. I get that this makes a dev's life simpler to just build the app and bring down the includes but it makes understanding what's going on so much harder for newbies. I'm a hobbyist programmer and started with CGI back in the dial up days lol. I have been finding the cost of entry for programming has jumped dramatically. You have to understand like 10 things just to program, you need a local dev environment, with LAMP or WAMP so that is 4 things you need to know. Understanding GitHub repositories, understanding composer, understanding what a yaml file is for.
Haha it has been a learning curve for sure to understand all this new stuff when before I was just used to uploading files to the FTP and that's it!! Mind you when compiling an app for Google App Engine it takes like 15 minutes even for a single file app so I understand the need to test it and debug it locally so that each code change does not take 15 each time.
I am going to attempt the master branch build just so I understand the process and learn from it. But just to clarify if I have an existing 3.3 forum. I have it running locally on WAMP no issues. I can try setting up master branch to run it all by itself on my local machine and lets say i get it to work. How do I update 3.3 to 4? I still seem to be confused how to do this
In general it should be enough to copy the version 4 files to the version 3 installation. After that you should delete the files in the cache folder. Visit /utility/update and that's it.
The most safe approach is
This way you will never have orphan files. No need to stick exactly to that steps above, I think you got the idea.
thanks @R_J
I like the step by step this makes sense to me. One question I have is how do I get the MySQL data from the old forum to the new forum? Did the database structure not change from 3.3 to 4? if so is there a tool that imports that data from the old structure to the new structure? Or did it not change?
There is not only /utility/update but also /utility/structure. That will check if the database structure needs to be changed. But it should be part of the /utility/update process. But just to be sure, when I do an upgrade I run /utility/update several times and after that /utility/structure also several times. /utility/structure will always show three messages by the way. It's just the way the check is implemented which makes them being shown again and again. They can be ignored.
Composer is a bless. It's great to have a list of libraries available at packagist.org and being able to install them with a simple
composer require eierlegende-wollmilchsau.All those other build tools in the JavaScript eco system are way beyond my understanding. People do not write JavaScript, but TypeScript, but that needs to be compiled to JavaScript. And people like to use some new JavaScript standard features which aren't supported in all browsers. So they use "ES6" features, which need to be downgraded magically. And JavaScript files should certainly be minified. CSS can be more efficiently written in SASS, SCSS, LESS, WHATEVER, but that also requires a compilitation step. And certainly they should be minified, too. So there are uncountable tools. Because that is so confusing, people invent more and more "simpler" tools so that it gets even more complicated. Believe me: composer is a bless in many aspects ;-)
Thank you @R_J , i built a master vanilla with debian on windows! i will now test to install this version in a local environment!