RavenNuke 3

Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2018 1:11 pm

It's hard not to comment and I do so solely because as much as things change, I guess to some degree, they just seem to stay the same.

I wouldn't pretend to enter the discussion (I won't call it an argument) of various presentation methodologies versus alternative grid solutions such as Bootstrap and/or Foundation without dubious restraint. I do have significant Nuke template mod experience and have my own varied opinions about the pros and cons of the aforementioned CSS rewrite solutions mainly surrounding my historical bitch about ensuring the entire CMS is 100% W3C presentation standards compliant. I choose to neither criticize anyone that would go to the trouble of completely recoding the template architecture; nor anyone like me that instead chose to simply re-coded the entire existing Nuke modules and templates to eliminate the bugs, filter everything and achieve 100% W3C compliance. When you incorporate module development into this particular conversation, you are forcing a development standard modification either up or down in the change. This may (or may not) have huge implications for those already utilizing additional modules (not part of the core) and for that reason, you'll lose some in any change. I'm not a fan of rewriting templates once I've finished standardizing them already; but I never object to viewing the results of someone implementing another solution and measuring the impacts. If the CMS interface can be made BETTER while complying to development standards with no downsides, I say show me the code. So far, the solutions that have chosen to opt for a "pages" development structure may benefit from grid solutions; but in a comprehensive CMS with already developed module and templates solution, YMMV.

I'm presently absorbing the latest standards and models in comparison to the code that I integrated, developed, tweaked and shared oh so many years ago.

Now, without casting disparaging remarks in any particular direction, I wanted to comment that I'm fairly disappointed that the code used here on Raven's home domain seems so out of date. I'm not blaming anyone (certainly not Gaylen who has had much bigger things to worry about); but yeah it would be nice to see advances from a decade ago be integrated while he has his back turned. For example fixing Forums UCP versus Your Account, which (at least here) is broken and YA significantly incomplete. It would be nice to be able to change my signature and none of those properties are alterable in UCP or even available in YA. Just saying, ... Hmmm... that's not right and that code is old old old. I also wonder what is going on with News module and comments. I rewrote all of that code for 1CMS a decade ago and thought that some of it would have shown back up in the baseline after I pumped it all back to the PHP-Nuke mothership so long ago. Apparently not.

In closing, it's nice to see Raven is back and feeling better, I've been watching when I can. It's also nice to see that many of the old familiar faces are still here. No I'm not dead, I've just spent the past 12+ years running IT/Telecom in Disaster zones and just had no time to code or contribute. Hopefully, some of that will change in the future now that I have more time on my hands.

Steph

Site Admin Joined: Aug 22, 2007 Posts: 1772

RavenCMS:

Yes again, the theme-structure will follow a new approach away from RN2.5x. I will try to move the current alpha-build of RavenCMS from Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap 4, because there are many really cool new features available based on fresh web-technologies. We shouldn't miss it.

The News-module in RavenCMS got a complete rewrite based on Nuken's TON and my own modifaction of it. But if you want, you can share the ideas of your changes on it. Maybe you have some cool ideas.

For all fans of the current released build 2.5x:

I'm currently working on a PHP7-ready version of RN2.5x with many fixed issues, which I found in the last years while working with it. So everyone, who wants still work with the RN2.5x can do it with full support by us! No worries! We will try to fix bugs in order to let it run on the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. This new build will be the first repo on github, followed by RavenCMS.

ravenphpscripts.com:

Yes, this is a modded version with mixed code from the past and present. I don't know who has the control over it at the moment but this kind of issue should be fixable.

Wink

Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6432

Nice to see you again, Steph!

I'm afraid I am the bottleneck regarding RPS website changes. Maybe life will allow me to make some changes here sometime this year...

If you have the rewritten code, please make it available so we don't reinvent the wheel. Definitely good to see you might have some time to contribute, and we always appreciate your insights!

Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2018 5:36 pm

64bitguy wrote:

I do have significant Nuke template mod experience and have my own varied opinions about the pros and cons of the aforementioned CSS rewrite solutions mainly surrounding my historical bitch about ensuring the entire CMS is 100% W3C presentation standards compliant.

Steph i know how you feel but... times change.
If i need to count how much work i've put in writing things that are thrown away, my life would be miserably depressed.
For example, in 2012 i got OpenID and XRI working as login system. In 2015 it got deprecated in favour of OpenID Connect.

What you did with fixing HTML is admirable, and i did the same thing in the past. Yet, you can't solve all bad coding of others.
"So how do you solve bad coding?" I asked myself.
First XHTML and then HTML5 and i could start over with the new standards.
So i looked at template systems: Twig, Smarty, Mustache, Blade, you name it!
And then i found Zope's TAL and thought "hey i could use an XML parser on this and throw errors in the face of the designer".
And then i thought: "Hey i could write a WYSIWYG that supports TAL and throw errors in the face of the user".
And then i thought: "Hey i can't do that with any of the others!"
So my mission was clear: write a fast template system on the basis of Zope's TAL in PHP
I knew PHPTAL exists, but it was too bloated and is dead since 2014 anyway.

Back in 2010, when it started, co-workers had to work with it and they got angry.
Why? Because many HTML they wrote got thrown back in their faces with parse errors.
So i told them: you thought you are good at doing what you do. Now you are pissed on yourself because apparently you are not that good.
After 1/2 a year moaning they really became good HTML writers and almost without errors.

So that's when i decided to put it in Dragonfly CMS and my Poodle WCMS.

But.... then i rewrote code to switch from xml_parse to XMLReader to get it even faster with less memory.

So the moral of the story is actually: even if you did a good job and time throws it away, you must stay proud of it!
Steph: stay proud of your work, but don't let change hold you back on your "precious" work Wink

Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2018 6:19 pm

The real big issue is the old code standard and today is it needed to build themes with responsive features. Everyone is using mobile devices, smart tvs etc. This is simply not possible with the current build RN25x without massive changes in the core files and on exactly this point, is it needed to re-think and re-code the whole structure.

Spasticdonkey and the rest of the involved developers have done a great job on the current RavenCMS version but in between some integrated solutions have new versions, which needs also new modifications.

For example on the client-side css-floats are more and more deprecated and replaced with the flex-box technique. The next step will be an browser-internal grid-system. Design-grids are really helpful and frameworks like bootstrap are really great on this way. Everyone who has tried to work with design-grids, who know how fast you can realize great designs.

Everyone can see these grids on professional print-products, websites, video-productions etc. This is much more than only to build own css-styles from scratch. This is a way how media-designers are working today. Each simple wordpress theme is working on this way. 100% W3C compliance is still my goal and this is for sure possible with css/js-frameworks like bootstrap and it will be also the standard of RavenCMS.

On the server-side PHP7.2 is released, PHP5.6x is getting the last security patches.

I'm working since more than 5 weeks on a "patch-package" for the current build RN251. All these changes are only based on the new PHP and MySQL versions and it will only provide the functionality as you know it without any frontend-changes. It will be same as you know. It will only fix the issues with PHP5.6x, PHP7.x and MySQL5.x and maybe it will not more work correctly with earlier versions. These 5 weeks were scheduled to get a BETA of RavenCMS out of the door but there were more issues as expected. To re-check code from 2012/2013 in 2017/2018 needs time. At the end everyone, who wants stay on RN25x, who can do it and we will try to support it in the future. But I hope you can expect, there is no future-development scheduled anymore. If someone will work with it on his own website - ok fine. But it is not scheduled to port new versions of the modules in RavenCMS to the oldstable.

The main-goal of RavenCMS is a new standard with new techniques. I can understand that some users don't want deep changes based on much more self-made deep changes but without this huge step forward, we can not modernize it as it needed. In RavenCMS you can also create own themes based on own css-styles etc. There is no need to use bootstrap on the frontend but is strongly recommended because the whole backend is working with it and it would very easy to use it also for the frontent.

Again. Download Bootstrap4, check the documentation and try it out.

Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2018 11:43 am

I dislike bootstrap and that has many reasons.
Many developers/webdesigners should be shot by using bootstrap, they are incapable CSS webdesigners.

Especially the ones who write embed widgets with it.
It doesn't matter if my website uses bootstrap or not, someone always screws up my design by loading their own bootstrap.css

Same problem with JavaScript frameworks.

Go look at a Joomla website and count all the jquery.js versions that get loaded by components.
The worst one i found loaded:
- 1 different jquery-2.x.js
- 4 different jquery-1.x.js
- 2 different jquery-ui.js
- 3 bootstrap.css
- 1 mootools.js

It's ok to use bootstrap.css but please make some sort of CSS and JS manager that only permit 1 version.

Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2018 1:36 pm

Bootstrap is not webdesign in general its a css-framework with a responsive grid-system and some jquery-plugins. If you want also use the plugins, then you have to add the bootstrap.min.js after the jquery-frameworks and NOT a css-file but maybe it was an typo in your post. But this has nothing to do with the jquery-framework versions. Just you need jquery-framework to use the bootstrap-plugins like carusel - not more.

If you are creating a complex grid with your own skills - just do it! Smile

But for me is it simply wasted time because with bootstrap I have the time to build the real webdesign-elements without to create my very own grid, which will be out-of-date in not more than 1 year. Why should I do this? Bootstrap is an great example how you can use your own webdesign-elements while the grid-system is changed in the background from css-floats to flex-box. You will nothing lose of your own styles - its just perfect. On the same way with foundation or other grid-systems. At the end a framework like this is very helpful to provide a responsive layout structure - so why not?! If someone wants to create his own template-grid - ok fine. Its all open source and everyone can change it.

I also had it seen that some devs are destroying templates with it but this is not really caused by bootstrap - it s caused by the devs itself.

I don't know why the joomla-devs are doing this but it makes sense to load maybe the latest jquery framework, after that the latest jquery-migration and then all you needed jquery-plugins. The migration is providing the backward compatibility for old jquery-plugins, jquery-ui is only another collection of plugins. Ya for sure it makes more sense to replace the plugins with newer version as long they are available. But this you can try to explain the users, who are haven't the knowlegde about it and they are only crying why plugins are not more working.

But I follow your way like to add only one jquery-version and the plugins should be loaded only on the needed areas and not all together on each page.

Wink

Involved Joined: Feb 03, 2006 Posts: 269

Hello - its been a while

Far to many threads to read! just thought id say hello and read any updates / browse some of the threads

Ped

Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2018 1:10 pm

Hello!

I'm currently on the way to let it work with Bootstrap4 and php7 support.

RavensScripts

Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2018 1:17 pm

neralex wrote:

Hello!

I'm currently on the way to let it work with Bootstrap4 and php7 support.

RavensScripts

Staging area or localhost?

Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2018 2:24 pm

Currently on my localhost because at the moment there are many things to test and port from Bootstrap3 to Bootstrap4. The frontend is ready but the backend is still running with Bootstrap3. If I fixed it completely, then I will publish an repository on Github.

Worker Joined: Nov 09, 2012 Posts: 127

Wow, I created this thread over five years ago! So glad to see RavenNuke still around. phpNuke is my favorite CMS software along with bb2Nuke, even with all the advancements of Wordpress.

I was a freshman in high school when I made this thread, now I am an IT student in college Smile

once again, glad to see neralex, djmaze, kguske, and others still hanging around!

I am looking forward to the GitHub repository.

Regular Joined: Jan 16, 2009 Posts: 91

Is there a way to download Raven CMS? I haven't tried it out yet.

Hangin' Around Joined: Jul 09, 2006 Posts: 49

Any further updates on this project alpha/beta testers needed? Have two sites one of which has been running on Raven for 14 years now.. Smile

Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2018 10:09 pm

still in progress

Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2018 3:45 am

neralex wrote:

still in progress

Anything I can do to help you?

Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 2:16 am

Guardian2003, yes for sure. I will create an hidden GIT repo on bitbucket in the next days. The purifier must be added to Your_Account and to the Forums module. But more details later, when the repo is ready to use.

Worker Joined: Jun 16, 2004 Posts: 159 Location: Sweden

Any progress on raven cms?