Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Mar 16, 2021
- 1648 views
Would it be sacrilege to suggest a ready-to-go, non-EU powered solution (be that hosted or self-hosted), that already has the tooling needed to add sub-forums and other things dynamically?
Not at all! It's a valid suggestion and it's been discussed before. I believe the opinion at the time was that we should be eating our own dog food and writing the entire website in Euphoria was the way to do that. But I also feel the level of detail to which we went at that time, and the number of "bells and whistles" we tried to pack into the server, borders on not invented here syndrome (we were even running email and DNS on the old server). Keep in mind that was thirteen years ago and a lot of the world has changed. I think the culture and resources supporting software development have grown and matured a lot since then.
My current motivation is to reduce our attack surface. Things can't get done if there are too many things to do. I don't have the resources to babysit a web server and a database server and a source code server and continuous build server and so on and so on. I migrated from our own Mercurial server to GitHub. Now I' working on setting up nightly builds there as well. Then we can move to doing releases from those builds. After that I'd like to maybe migrate our wiki and tickets there as well. Then all that's left running here is news and the forum.
As it stands, I think Euphoria MVC is in a "good enough" state to start building a website, even if we only use the routing and templates and other utilities (like JSON) for now. But overall its API will likely change and anything written now will have to be updated over time to accommodate. I have an overhaul of the database library mostly completed and then I will commit and publish a new version. Then I'd like to redo the model framework and use that to build a user and authentication framework.
So again, you're absolutely correct that we could. Do I want to? No, not really. And I think we have bigger fish to fry than forum features right now anyway.
-Greg