Feedback on first round of BoltWire 7 changes...

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Dan Vis

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May 13, 2020, 10:25:51 AM5/13/20
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Hi all,

One of my goals with BoltWire 7 is to streamline the core engine of all unnecessary features to enhance performance. But admittedly, I'm basing this on my own personal usage. So I want to list what I'm thinking of stripping out and how I intend to keep these options accessible for those who want them, and solicit feedback before hacking the code...

Features Being Removed:

Stopwatch: I'll keep the function but delete all the places it's tagged in the code. Pretty much only a developer would use this, and if you are working with the code already it's super easy to put those tags where you want manually.

Blacklisting/Whitelisting: I'll put this up as a plugin.

Import Requests: BoltWire can be use to feed content to other sites via curl requests. This could also easily be done via plugin.

Ajax: I recently added an undocumented feature which allows dynamic updating of sites. I think this might be better done as a plugin too.

Buffer Output: This is a feature that allows BoltWire to release the browser and then run background php processes. I'm not sure I ever got it quite to work anyway, and I find myself just using a real cron job for these kinds of things.

Settings Being Changed:

Site Pages: I want to put these in pages/site folder rather than just pages. This will require manually moving your pages or adding a line to your index.php folder. If this is problematic, there might be some workaround, but it's tricky because of when the site.config folder is processed. One solution might be to add a line to the start.php process...

IndexSetup: This creates an automatic indexing of the site but can affect performance. It might be worth keeping turned on by default, but it might be better to leave it off, until a person is ready to get into setting up the indexing system, as getting everything right can be a bit tricky.

Account Folder: I'll be setting up a new top level field folder called accounts (or maybe mbase for member database). This will be used in the new account management system. More info on this as I pull this together.

BoltWire Variable: The $boltwire variable defining the location of the core engine is currently set in the index.php file when using the start script. And duplicated in the core engine. I'd like to delete that from the core. If you are setting up sites manually, and you don't already have that variable in your index.script, though, that would cause a problem though. Optionally, I could delete from the index.php file start creates, but that's less efficient. Trivial, I know--we're talking nanoseconds. 

A New Utilities Script:

I'm also going to move most of the functions currently in engine.php into a separate utilities script--which will make engine.php a super lightweight script. That means you could easily make a copy of it, call it myengine.php or whatever, tweak however you want, and then call that instead of engine.php in your index script. This would give you the highest level of customization possible. But to make that useful, this script needs to be super lean, lightweight, clean, and well documented. So that's the plan...

Admittedly some of this is me thinking out loud. Feedback welcome if you have any input! For most people, unless you use one of the features above, these changes will be seamless. And even if you do, the upgrade path for each should be pretty easy. 

Input welcome,
Dan

TMurNGon

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May 14, 2020, 12:19:04 PM5/14/20
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Hi Dan,

From my side I'm fine with all of the above. The pages/site suggestion will be good for me as I already use the facility to create/use sub folders for various page types (site.pages as well) and site.config currently has to break my categorisation rules by being in the pages folder in order for Boltwire to function... so all good there.

Looking forward to v7.
Cheers,
Jan

Dan Vis

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May 14, 2020, 2:14:09 PM5/14/20
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Note Jan, to keep your site.config folder in pages/site just put this line in your index.php script before calling the engine.

  $sitePages = 'pages/site';  

I realized the solution to putting future site pages in a subfolder without breaking existing sites is to simply add that line to the index.php page via the start.php script.

Cheers,
Dan

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TMurNGon

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May 14, 2020, 2:16:05 PM5/14/20
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Nice, thanks Dan.
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Dan Vis

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May 14, 2020, 2:25:24 PM5/14/20
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Sure! In the new system, BoltWire will automatically detect the existence of the subfolders and go to that location if it exists. So this line won't be needed. And that will be true for all folders, so you won't need to maintain a site.folders directory.

You'll just need to make sure the subfolder names matches the first part of the page name, and that all your pages are in the right place.

For BoltWire 7, I'm just leaning making sure all site pages are put in a subdirectory by default. Or maybe, a command that moves all pages of a certain p1 into a subfolder. One click, does it and you're done. And everything just works. That's an even better idea, so you can change things up at any time without having to access ftp... 

Hmmm,
Dan

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TMurNGon

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May 14, 2020, 2:31:32 PM5/14/20
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That sounds great, but I do sometimes use site.folders to herd pages with more than one p1 into the same folder (or even sub-sub folder). Will this still be possible?

Dan Vis

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May 14, 2020, 2:35:40 PM5/14/20
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Yes, sounds like we have both done the same things with our sites! They have a way of growing don't they?

One option is for BoltWire to use the old system if site.folders exists, and the new if it doesn't. Or more likely, to make it a built in plugin you can easily turn on.

Cheers,
Dan

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TMurNGon

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May 14, 2020, 2:42:06 PM5/14/20
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Either of those options are good for me... as long as they are well documented so people (and me after a while...) remember about it.

mz

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May 17, 2020, 7:30:25 AM5/17/20
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Are there any advantages (speed?) out of the folders or do you use them just for ftp maintenance?

Greetings, Martin (keeps all files in the pages folder)

Dan Vis

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May 17, 2020, 9:55:43 AM5/17/20
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One advantage of having your pages organized into folder is it makes searching a lot faster, as you can specify just searching for pages in a given subfolder. But apart from that, I think the main advantage for me is just easier ftp maintenance.

Blessings,
Dan

Climb higher in your walk with God...


On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 6:30 AM mz <tcc.p...@gmail.com> wrote:
Are there any advantages (speed?) out of the folders or do you use them just for ftp maintenance?

Greetings, Martin (keeps all files in the pages folder)

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