Is Github current?

Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2022 4:23 pm

Is the repository at [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ] up to date?
It's been far too long and thought I'd try and catch up.

Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6432

Wow...great to see you! I believe it's updated. I'm sure neralex will confirm.

What are you up to these days? I started converting a responsive theme, but haven't made much progress.

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2022 7:30 am

Hi kguske. I'm administering some game servers at the moment for a game called 'Rust' and doing voluntary work.
I wasn't sure whether to have a look at RN2.5x or dig out an old copy of RN3. So much has changed, especially with PHP since I last looked.

Site Admin Joined: Aug 22, 2007 Posts: 1772

Guardian2003, yeah nice to see you here again. This is the current stable 2.5.x-build for php7. This build is also running on RPS with php 7.4.28. But there is no possibility for HTML5 and responsive features - this build is still based on the codebase of RN 2.5.1.

This build works with a fresh install and also for upgrades from 2.5.0 and RN 2.5.1 but there is a huge issue with the database collation while upgrading a database with specialchars as you know it from languages like german, ungarian or french.

The current builds of MariaDB and MySQL8 have modifications based on the utf8-collation-standards and this is causing unreadable chars, when the source databases are converted from latin1 to utf8 in the past. The current utf8-standard is utf8mb4 and this doesn't work with old databases from 2.5.x and makes also trouble with the old RN3-package. This issue exists also here on RPS, because I got the database already with a utf8-collation. So someone has tried a convertion from latin1 to utf8 already before I got the installation in my hands. I'm currently on the end of my knowledge to solve this collation-mismatching.

This is the reason why I stucked on the developement on RN3 because without to solve this issue, there is no way to upgrade from 2.5.x to RN3. In this case: why someone should use it, when it is not possible to upgrade from prior versions? There are enough CMS-solutions availabe to start completely from scratch, which have active communities to get it patched for new versions of PHP or MySQL which, are not bonded on a single frontend-framework.

The old RN3-package ist still based on Bootstrap3 (already EOL) and there were issues with the old html-table-based codelines. I tried an HTML-markup-update to Bootstrap4 but since I stucked on the dabase-issue, Bootstrap5 is already released with big changes to Bootstrap3 and Bootstrap4. AND the old RN3-package isn't ready for php7.4 or php8. A lot of used scripts and libraries are also outdated or not more supported.

So I decided to keep alive the current 2.5.x build as long I can't find a solution for the database issue.

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2022 12:21 am

Yes, I think that is why I also found it difficult to move forward. By the time you fix/update one thing, there is something else that needs to be looked at and you just end up making constant updates rather than actually enjoying using the system you are developing. At least Bootstrap have promised that all versions after v5.0 will be backward compatible so that is one less headache.

I have not seen a solution to the database utf8 to utf8mb4 problem. If I remember correctly, ut8 uses 2 bytes per character and utf8mb4 uses 4 bytes per character so it would be pretty much impossible to 'convert' an existing database.

There has to be a time when backward compatibility is no longer viable Sad

I'll check your PM later when I have more time.