CJ, have you had a look at FoxProg? (http://fox.noisen.com)
If you look into the database (not the blog itself), you'll find that it has many aspects that you're thinking of integrating into your system. You know, like the fact that an artist should be able to have several tags for them rather than just one category, things like that!

Thanks Garou and Trevor for your posts.
Pete, I'm totally with it on this
("We are the consequence", ahah. So true.)
CJ, are you working on a forum system yourself? (Saw that on your blog...)

Sorry Gilles, not really heard much about you.  But thats cause I am a sleep half of the time.

Nah, that's probably 'cause you didn't use Aeva Media... It was such a 'big' mod (sheer size of it, and the amount of community activity around it), that I ended up having to kill it several times -- each time coming back to it because it tickled me, and each time overwhelming me with the amount of work it represented. I had to choose between AeMe and our fork, so I chose the fork and never got to regret it. Will come back to AeMe later when I finish the port.
Anyway -- I never really got into the SM.org boards. I only posted in a few topics, always the same. No surprise some people never heard of me. Had no urge in posting everywhere. Unlike Pete who HAD to post under a new nickname after he'd left sm.org

regardless, Pete, to me (who is Still a Noob user, not permitted to the BIG forum) you were the face of SMF..  I honestly figured without reasearch you were the Lead on the project, and if nothing else thought you were SMF.  Bet you someone is kicking their but now that you two are gone.

They're not kicking themselves, and that's the problem: they've never, ever done anything to hurt themselves -- and if you don't hurt, you don't move forward. Which is exactly what SMF needed... They're in their comfort zone, and they're not planning to move away from it. Seriously... They're so eager not to be involved in anything, that it sounds dumb. Just like this guy I heard on TV today: "Are you religious? - No no no... Neither a believer nor an atheist, all that shit." (News flash: if you're an atheist, you're religious. )

anyway..  I just want to wish you guys the best of luck with all of this, and let you know that I too have been in this kind of situation before.  Working tirelessly to help build something big and because of some narrow minded thinkers, you get pushed out because they know it all.

Well, good thing we had the opportunity to rebuild the thing ourselves then.
Only, it's way more work than I would have anticipated. I originally just wanted to rewrite a few features and include my mods in a default install, ah ah... Well, after 650 commits, we're not even there yet (I mean, we've done tons of things, but I'm not done integrating my mods.)

Trust me, Your better off now!!!  After reading all of this thread, I too like many here, cant wait to "Convert" It will be worth it.

I'm convinced of it, myself.

I was all excited about the project the "SMF Friends" (I prefer ex-patriots) had in the works.

We all were, yeah... But it was interesting to 'build', if only as a confirmation that democracy is great on paper, but in any serious real-life project it can kill it very quickly.
That's why our fork is really just Arantor and I. Just the two of us as bosses, just the two of us as developers. Because we know the game. We've played it before -- sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. Put one and one together and you get a project that has now been under active development for the last six months and a half, with 652 commits so far, making for an average of 3+ per day. The SMF svn often remains silent for weeks, in comparison...

Also note that ever since I stopped all communication with SMF, there has been no single flamewar on my side. Interesting... And they said I was too unstable to join a team, eh. It was definitely not a problem on my side. *They* were too scared of seeing me join them, then end up leading them after a while. People with a vision scare them. Why do you think they've been stuck for the last 3 years on betas and RCs? Even SMF 2.1... They've started work on it. One would think that they would use the opportunity to put in all of the features they were prevented from adding to the SMF2 codebase in all these years, wouldn't they..? Well, sure. They did absolutely nothing. SMF 2.1 is already dead before it was even born...

Now, all we're waiting for is for them to release SMF2 with the BSD license and then we can officially take over. Problem is, they know how much work we've put into our project... The same way they were scared of taking me in, they're probably now scared of allowing our fork to go public. Because it will only show the incredible gap between the SMF team's work and ours.

The concept of it being a core code to which everything else would plug into seemed perfect to me. Unfortunately that project seems to have died almost as quickly as it started. The project site was down more then it was up which led to me losing my interest in it and last I knew over half the people that were initially committed to it did as well.

Yeah... It was born in January, 'democracy' was brought in around early February, and by late February the project was dead. By the end of March, everyone had left -- either to rejoin SMF (ah ah), or to completely leave these kinds of projects.

It is my belief the mods, plug-ins, extentions, etc should rarely and preferably never have to modify the core code to work.

My feeling, too.
Actually, I'd really like for our fork to completely prevent the ability of modifying core code... But it's hard than it sounds. There are some changes that can't be done differently. Still, I'm set on changing the terminology to call these edits "hacks", hopefully inviting mod developers to use hooks and external files as much as possible.

It just opens the door to extra bugs and incompatibility.

Hooks are not the be all and end all of plugin programming, though. Just look at WordPress... Everytime they release a new version, some older versions of plugins become incompatible. It's not something you can 'fix' in any way. The only 'fix' is to no longer update the master software...

It looks like this project seems to hold that philosophy too. I like that a lot.

Arantor is the philosopher, the one with a vision (and what a vision!). I'm just the one who hacks into the files, and either throws the hacks away or decides they're cool and keeps it. My vision is to write the software I always wanted to use

After reading this thread beginning to end I really like what I'm seeing. After all the changes you two have made can it truly be called a fork at this point. [Unknown] may have had Yabb in mind when he was working on his "secret code" but by the time SMF was released it was truly something different. Without seeing your code, what I'm hearing/reading seems to be well on its way to being something very different from SMF.

Well, I suppose it depends on how you view it...
Technically, you could say that some themes are even further away from the SMF philosophy than our fork is at all.
So, it depends on what you're looking at. If you use our fork for a while, you'll end up noticing that some things are different -- for the better. But overall, it's still based on the SMF engine. We did rewrite at least 25% of the codebase so far, but that still leaves us with 75% of the SMF codebase... Most of which is very good and doesn't really warrant a rewrite at all

As far as those concerned about mods, they are in the end simply mods. If the original authors of those mods dont get behind this project, there are plenty of other people that would be willing to recreate the functionality of those mods.

(Or even us...)

I can already think of several that I use on a regular basis that I will be interested in porting over, if I like the finished product.

You can't port anything without the original author's approval, of course.

I can't wait to see the project once you guys make it public. I have spent enough time looking at the work you two have done over at SMF to know that this will find acceptance way beyond just the two of you.

Google may help you here... Eheh.

Good luck and thank you, from all of us who have been disenchanted with SMF for the last few years.

Wait until we go public and then you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the wait... (Hint: yes it will have been, eheh.)

If you're going to stick with smf it means you don't care about innovation, so why would you update aeme anyway

We're not asking for anyone's help really... We've been doing 100% of the work, just Pete and I, in the last 6 months, and we're fine with it. We will need people to provide support when the software package goes public, though.
The only things we discuss on our private forum are, err... Well, the new features and what we could do to make them even better

Anyone interested just pm me or Pete.

Sure, we're hiring right now I think

Success also means more responsibilities... It's a double-edged sword