Well, I've worked hard on security and optimization, now I'm working on speed. I've made some changes to how pages load. One speed-up is only loading images that are on the screen so, if you scroll down a page and images start appearing as you scroll, that's exactly what they are supposed to do. I'm still not satisfied with the speed of some things. I've shaved a second off here and there but some things still load slow. I have images being optimized, cache this and lazy-load that. The database is so clean you could eat off of it and there are still little lags here and there. Mostly on pages that have numerous youtube videos. The thing is, even if there are 30 "youtube videos" on a page there is really only one and 29 images. Those images are being served by youTube though. I can't do anything to them. The other "problem" is INSANE amounts of javascript loading. Can't do anything about that either other than make sure it is all minimized. I haven't checked but, the grand majority of plug-ins on this site are pro, I highly doubt there is any javascript that isn't minimized. I guess I should double-check and I will. However, minimized or not there is a LOT of javascript.

You may notice if you look really hard and in just the right places that there are some really small style issues. This is due to what I had to do in the css last night to get syntax hilighted code working. I could fix it all by deleting one rule. I don't want to delete the rule. I need to think about another rule that stops the first rule from being applied too broadly. It's so minor though, almost not even worth the effort if it wasn't for the fact I am so OCD about details. Some of you may say that you have noticed some discrepancies in form fields. You can't change the style on stuff like buttons for a drop-down field. Well, you can but it requires floating an image over the button and using javascript to pass the click along to the real element. I'm not doing that. That's hacky garbage IMO. I believe firefox lets you style various UI elements like scrollbars and stuff, maybe all form fields as well. Seems like a lot of work to cater to one browser so, there are simply some things on this site that don't exactly match and never will.

Maybe you have noticed other things like: If you go to a thread, the replies are last to first and all the replies cycle between 3 different background colors but, if you go to the news post for that exact same thread the replies are first to last and there is no alternation. I can fix the alternation by writing some rules that go one level deeper cause, threads "at the end of a news post" aren't at the end of shit. They are IN the post. Meaning they are nested deeper than their original rule. To fix the first to last issue would require me to dig in the plugin that's handling that and figure out why it cares that the thread is nested. I can do that. I'm not going to do that. I have all the skills in this world to rip the entire source for this site apart and make it do whatever I want in every language used to build this software ... and then plug-ins start breaking as they relied on some chunk of code I altered. The scope of code here is far too large for me to start meddling with the source. Now, the plug-in that changes sort order is so high up on the chain of code that I could probably change the whole thing and it wouldn't matter. I'm not going to find out.

I didn't even like putting the google prettify stuff in the header and I knew that wasn't going to do shit to the site. I REALLY didn't like changing minified js files to change what the reply editor sticks in the field when you press the code button. I REALLY REALLY absolutely hated completely changing the filters for allowed html tags so ANY user could actually use the code button. That one especially. That's the one that could have gone HORRIBLY wrong. The worst part is, I don't know what the fuck am I doing. I hunted all that down and guessed. Apparently I am a damn good guesser (so far and we hope). I tried googling for real answers. The closest thing I could find is information from 5 and more years ago. Trust me, that info is primarily wrong at this point. The only thing I gleaned from any of that info that was true, is which minified js file I needed to alter. As far as the other stuff goes, the files they told me to modify don't even exist anymore. I had to download the source to my entire site and use NP++'s "search all documents" feature to find the second half of an underscored var under the assumption that bbpress prefixed the standard wordpress global for allowed tags. I was right but, it wasn't prefixed with bbpress_. If it wasn't for that little trick I would have NEVER found it. And when I did find it I had to figure out what the hell I am even looking at. That part wasn't that hard actually, and I managed to double the amount of allowed tags.

This is just a test. I suppressed putting forum activity in profile activity stream and it doesn't seem to be working but, maybe it isn't retro-active.

Edit, hmmmm - no this isn't working. Why everything has to be such a pain in the ass? I said don't fuckin do it. The plugin claims it wont fucking do it. SO what the fuck is the deal.

edit2: Man, there should be a rule or something that if you make a wordpress plug-in you have to be 100% proficient in English and your instructions would receive at least a B grade by a professional instruction writer. I got the shit to work but, not because any of the fucking alien speak in the instructions were decipherable. Now only things that qualify as a profile update are listed in the profile activity thread.

In other words, making a little profile post, changing your avatar, commenting on a profile post, uploading things to your gallery,... shit like that.

Why does this matter to me? Simple, there is a private forum here but, it aint all that damn private if it is dumping all my private posts in my activity thread. Sometimes, I want to grab this forum by the throat and squeeze. I don't understand why I have to install a million different plug-ins to obtain the functionality that should have been included in the thing that the plugin is modifying in the first place. Why do I need a plugin to modify buddypress to suppress certain activity? Why isn't that a core feature? I have 3 major plugins and like 20 plugins making those 3 things work the way they should out of the box. It is frustrating. Here's a rich one. BBpress is our actual forum software. I had to install a plugin just to change the order posts are displayed. Are there complete fucking morons building this shit or something? I LITERALLY have a plugin thats keeping the very first post on top. O.o Imma have a fuckin heart attack!

BuddyPress is our profile plug-in. I have a plug-in so you can make your profile private! Now how the absolute fuck was that not included in buddypress! With how stupid this shit is sometimes, I'm surprised I don't need a plug-in to have plug-ins. None of this shit is new. How hasn't BuddyPress and BBPress already taken all these plugins and merged them with the main software?

I went around and tightened up a bunch of css details that I've noticed recently. One of them was the visual editor for posting. I never use that editor so there were some things that I never really noticed about it until today when I decided it would be easier to use it for duplicating Sevens SMC post. I cheated a little bit but everything is consistent. I noticed some issues with the profile galleries but, the way I do this I can't reproduce the issues in my admin panel css editor. I need to go to the gallery outside of the admin panel with firebug open, make a bunch of dynamic changes and either write them down or remember them and then type those changes into the admin panel css editor. I'll do that at another time, nobody even seems to be using most of the profile page options so the priority is really low on that stuff.

I added a bunch of stuff to the video gallery on the right bar and I think I am going to increase the number of recent posts that are displayed.

EDIT: done, now it shows the last 8 posts made. I also upped the number of items displayed under hilights in the side bar to match the number displayed on the home page (6)

EDIT2: I had to change the number of displayed recent posts to 7. 8 was was pushing things around on the home page

EDIT3: disregard that. I'm stupid. It only pushes stuff around if you have your browser windowed. It would do that no matter what anyway. It's back at 8. I could probably get away with 9.

It sucks but, at some point I am going to have pretty much no choice but to change this site to a 3 column layout. I can totally do it. I totally don't want to. This is the point where I go ripping apart the source to register another side-bar and pretty much never update this theme ever again (cause it would erase it). There actually is a way that I could keep this theme and build on top of it "remotely". Yeah, that's the way to go but, I still don't want to mess with it.

I don't like sidebars extending past the main content of the page forcing completely blank areas under the main content. There are quite a few pages that would require an awful lot in the sidebar for this to happen but, there are some pages where this is already happening and it's not like my sidebar is never going to get longer.

Well, I don't have any intention of doing any of that today but the time is coming. I'm going to clone this site and install it on a local server. I can't do this kind of surgery "live" cause things are going to get real messed up before they are made right.

Some plugins wanted to be updated so, I let them. One of them was a main tool that adds a lot of functionality to this forum. I set a bunch of new features but, I don't see anything indicating that they exist. Supposedly we have a bunch of new bbcode tags, and some other stuff but, I don't see any new buttons in either of the editors. I know users can see some stuff that I can't cause there are no restrictions at all for me. If any of you notice extra things that needs to be restyled let me know. Of course I could give my other account base permissions and check this myself but, I'm trying to do something else right now.

I did more. I got rid of one thing that I put in earlier and went a new way. The sidebars are now content aware (sorta). I redistributed some of the data and got rid of some things. Also, the content is somewhat dependent on what page you are on. I hate having a sidebar that is longer than the content of the page. Mostly, this does not happen anymore. There are some exceptions but, they are few and buried. I need to make more adjustments. It's not perfect yet.

I installed a very simple ajax chatroom. You can get to it from the same link in the right sidebar that used to be the chat-canvas link. When it comes to features there are pretty much none. You can chat. share links and emoticons work. That's probably it. I am positive bbcode and html do not work. There is no way to allow the users to to manage sound notifications so, I just turned them off entirely. I installed this particular chatroom for 3 reasons.

1) It works off of your existing account. There is no 3rd party anything.
2) It's clean and simple. It took minutes to install, configure and style.
3) It works in a "stand alone" way that does not interfere with anything. Even if the author eventually abandoned this forever it shouldn't make any difference at all.

This chat room is so low brau it didn't even have a "currently chatting" list. I reused the "users online" widget at the bottom of the right sidebar and told it to only show users that are on the chat page. If you are on the chat page, you are in the chat so... The instance on the chat page is the only one that is affected by my changes. The right sidebar version is unchanged. The current users are listed below the entire chat interface in an inline list.

There is now sort of a google docs feature in your profile. You can create commentable documents and set a whole lot of parameters. Here is an example:

Let's assume you formed a private group. You could create a document that is editable, commentable and viewable by only the people in your group.

Let's say you didn't have a group at all and you wanted only logged-in users of this site to be able to comment on the document, only you can edit it and even guests can view it. You can do that.

Let's say you had a public group and wanted your group to be able to comment, only you can edit and only logged-in users can view. You can do that

There are a lot of combinations and possibilities regarding permissions, pretty much any combination you can imagine.

You can create folders for your documents, folders inside of folders for your documents, attach files and probably use any bbcode the forum allows (maybe not, I honestly haven't tested that)

------

It's getting thick around here:

• site forum
• user groups
• user group forums
• buddy drive
• docs | group docs
• threads to pdf
• bullshit shoutbox
• profile audio/image gallery
• embed anything
• site video gallery
• tools/engine compendium
• content aware sidebars
• stale news and featured content
• syntax hilighted code
• polls
• you

Coming Soon (probably):
NextGenQuake TV & Live Customer Support

I tracked down the stylesheet my PDF maker was using and restyled it to match this site. It's a lot more of a color match and basically nothing like a page match. Which is good. It would be stupid to include all the page elements in the pdf.

I have pdfs capturing entire threads. It's a little on the ugly side right now but, I'll make it better soon. This is almost a done deal. It really is down to it just being ugly. Lemme tell you, hunting down the function for looping thread replies was, well, impossible. Everything I found in templates did not work coming from another plug-in. And honestly, I'm glad. All those functions print straight to the page in place. I'm not feeling like a bunch of ob_start() and ob_get_clean() was the way to go for this. I needed raw data so I can merge it into my own html and that's exactly what I did.

I found one function that gets a thing and another function that can use that thing and then returned the thing the second function got from the thing it used. Then the thing I got was looped and turned into a new thing that became a sanitized thing... and then I made it an html thing and we're good.

If anybody out there is trying to figure out how to get all replies to a topic for bbpress in an object of raw data... it goes a lil summin like this;

function cmp($a, $b)
{    return strcmp($a->ID, $b->ID);
}

if ( ! function_exists( 'gypsy_get_replies' ) ) {
    function gypsy_get_replies($id) {
        $replies = bbp_get_all_child_ids($id, bbp_get_reply_post_type());
        $rep= array();
        foreach ( $replies as $reply_id ) {
            $rep[] = bbp_get_reply($reply_id);
        }
        
        usort($rep, "cmp");
        return $rep;
    }
}

and you can implement it like this

$replies = array();
$rep_table = '';

if(count($replies = gypsy_get_replies($p->ID)) > 0)
{	$rep_table = '<table class="reply_table">';
	foreach($replies as $v)
	{	//build your table or whatever it is you want to do
	}
	$rep_table .= '</table>';
}

$html .= $rep_table;

And, if anybody did need this for some reason, you're welcome. Imma tell you right now, going over various templates and functions.php files to try and find the couple few functions that made this happen SUCKED! It was like trying to find a passage in the bible by doing a text search of the whole thing using a super common word and then sifting through all the results.

edit:
This is how I audited all the vars I can use

if ( ! function_exists( 'gypsy_replies_object_print' ) ) {
    function gypsy_replies_object_print($id) {
        $replies = bbp_get_all_child_ids($id, bbp_get_reply_post_type());
        $rep = '';
        foreach ( $replies as $reply_id ) {
            $rep .= print_r(bbp_get_reply($reply_id), true);
        }
        echo $rep;
        die();
    }
}