Hm i have never seen that error never the less i shut of gzip for now. Sorry about that.
no problem !
Site/Board is looking good !
Nice work !
regards,
zi
thanks does it look fairly easy to use other than any contrast issues due to color choice?
I was trying to get a good mix between usability and simplicity. For instance the forums here although they are done for simplicity are simply not a familiar layout for most and it takes a little bit to learn were things are at. So my idea was to combine simplicity of use with a layout that is a little more familiar.
looks good.
@ global topics don’t register as a thread count.
@ graphics for new topic/new polls are a little blurry
Beyond that looks good.
So how would you compare mercury to SMF ?
Tangent-Warrior
thats kind of like asking how would you compare modx to mambo. Of course mambo has a bigger community and possibly way more plugins and things for it but really I have done quite a reading on mambo allot of devs (not the core dev team) are sick of mambo since they will have security updates and things that will break the api and then all the modules and things have to be recoded. Also I watch bugtrack with monitors security threats for different cms systems and honestly mambo is almost as bad as phpbb.
So smf is based on yabbse which used to be gpl but now it is not. Yabbse never got much usage because ?? it was ful of security holes. The same team now codes smf and although I have seen a bunch of security issues with it on bugtrack I’m not sure I trust it. I dont think it has enough users yet so it is not targetted as much.
My biggest grips about smf though is its license. It might as well be a closed source lincense since
1) you can not redistribute their code in any way. You either get it from them or you dont get it.
2) they have stated in their license that they have the right to change it at any time they wish.
I have read their forums and although I’m not particularly worried about them going commercial those are the exact same license restrictions the free version of ipb had and a few years later they went commercial. If that ever happened then you either pay for upgrades or you go someplace else for a board to work with.
Now this is just me but I only have so much time on my hands and only so many projects I can work on.
1) I dont have time to waste on closed projects like ipb or smf. I could spend allot of my time coding for them but since I cant distribute my code to anyone it is more or less worthless later on other than for use on little personal sites.
2) there are plenty of open source projects like mercuryboard and modx that although they might not be quite as big as some of the others have really great potential. The coding in them is great on not second rate. They perform well and do things I need. I can develop myself whatever else I need.
Now I have not seen the admin side of smf and so can not comment on it but compared to other boards I have worked with I really like mercury. (I do allot of mods for phpbb and am very familiar with it). Even though mercury is light weight (about 11 sql calls max on a page load) It packs features that phpbb does not even have by default like subforums. The whole download for mercury is only about 600k so it is very small yet it packs a punch. The coding all classes and very clean. by adding more classes it is very easy to write modules for.
To sum it up it’s clean coding, small, good features, easy to code for, and gpl. I suspect that smf has more features but after looking at the security model of mercury it is clean and secure by design to begin with.
Oh sorry did I mention the theming system for mercury. It’s great it uses web interface for the templates just like modx. It also has an nice easy installer system for the themes so you can install and export themes very easily as a single zipped up file. After I converted that last theme I simply copied the theme form my modx install for greentrack and switched the variables around to mercury variables and within about 4 or 5 minutes I was able to use it on mercury. Now mind you i did spend the better part of a day learning mercury and getting the red train theme just right but after that I simply clone it and copy and past my greetrack theme in edit the css for greentrack and it’s up and running. I still need to make some new graphics but you get the idea how easy it is.
No i had not. It looks interesting but I think mercury looks a little more like a traditional board and not so spartin.
Also I was mesing with my board and broke it sorry guys I’ll have it back up a few days but I dont have time right now to do it.
Thanks for the long post.
From what you just wrote, I can pretty much agree. I too have tended to stay with the opensource rather than free based programs. I guess it’s a matter of preference but I have to admit it does have a share to do with the whole concept of the GPL.
lolo, I must be some kind of idealist or something like that.
I had heard similar things about YABB hmmm, I thought YABBSE was the fork of YABB due to the security problems. Oh well, internet history looses retention just as fast as my memory recently.
hmmm, I wonder about here? Be interesting to see a joint venture/tie up of sorts between the 2. Official plugin support by a an out side source. This would definitely be intesting on the net. I have never seen such tie ups before in theopen source community (err, made I never noticed).
split the development and share in spreading the word.
:D
cheers
Tangent-Warrior
