The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So, the phpBB install here has gotten pretty outdated, and upgrading to the latest version will be a huge hassle. So, instead, we've decided to try out myBB as something to maybe switch to at some point, since that will also make it easier for us to build new features for the site. It also makes for a more mobile-friendly experience, which at least two people have been asking for!

We have myBB running with a copy of the database at http://songfight.net/mybb/ - it is just a test forum and will be wiped out when/if we switch for reals (the new forum will be at the same location as the old forum), but please, play around with it and tell us what you think. Everything should be pretty much the same, although we haven't yet added in support for things like youtube or soundcloud tags or whatever (that can come later if we decide to move to it).

Thanks!

Oh and if anyone has another forum that's worth looking at, let me know. I've looked at a bunch of them but haven't been impressed with anything really (myBB is the least-unimpressive pretty much).

So myBB looks and feels very similar to phpBB, so it probably won't be that difficult of a switch. I couldn't find a 'View active topics' feature though, which seems pretty important. There is an active fork of SMF called ElkArte that looks pretty good and has some good buzz online.

Hm, I've used a couple of SMF forums in the past and they seemed pretty craptacular (especially with things like user customization and notifications and so on), but it could just be the way they were set up rather than anything wrong with the system itself. ElkArte looks way nicer at least at a glance, though. I'll definitely consider it.

I'm not seeing any web services for it. So, that's one thing.

Manhattan Glutton wrote:I'm not seeing any web services for it. So, that's one thing.

That is an important requirement for me, too, in terms of being able to automate my interactions with the boards during the fight updating processes.

The current myBB version doesn't have anything built-in but it does have a plugin which has some built-in RESTful endpoints and seems like it would allow us for coding new ones too:

https://github.com/medbenji/MyBB-RESTful-API-System

Built-in Web services are planned for a future version of mBB but I think fluffy said there isn't an ETA for that.

Yes, that is correct. Which is another reason to look more closely at ElkArte - it looks like it does provide some level of RESTful APIs although it's currently a bit fragmented. There's an effort underway to fix it though, apparently?

Is there a way to switch to mobile mode? The default mode isn't very mobile friendly and I didn't see any settings or links to go mobile.

The default theme should be mobile-responsive? It's still not amazing though. Also you might ahve to log in to get that theme.

Hm, nope, the theme just doesn't do some mobile-friendly things that it should. Ohw ell.

So this myBB can ingest the legacy board data? That's great!
-bill

This might be useful: http://themefreak.net/blog/how-to-make- ... e-friendly

Also, in case you decide to stick with phpBB: http://www.artodia.com/phpbb-styles/mobile/

Ah, that mobile mod for myBB looks nice.

That phpBB one's link is dead. But from the URL it's probably a theme? Themes aren't very good because the user still has to choose which One And Only theme to be presented with.

Okay, I fixed that second link. Apparently the trailing slash made all the difference...

Ah, thanks. Yeah, as I suspected, while it probably looks great on mobile, it's terrible on desktop. What we'd really like is a good responsive design.

I for one won't be happy until you can offer a scratch and sniff screen. So email me when that happens. Good day, sir.

....I SAID GOOD DAY!

I haven't moved forward on myBB stuff because I'm still not feeling particularly good about it. At some point I'll try out ElkArte since that seems a lot more promising.

fluffy wrote:Oh and if anyone has another forum that's worth looking at, let me know. I've looked at a bunch of them but haven't been impressed with anything really (myBB is the least-unimpressive pretty much).

Well, sir, I run the front-end dev department at the world's largest IT consultancy, and I was a core contributor to Drupal 7... so my vote is gonna be for Drupal, given that it ties in well with community management and will allow you to more tightly integrate the forum with other site features like your ability to manage the fights and submissions. I'd be happy to prop up a test instance for you on one of my servers if you're curious how that might operate. =)

Just looked at the ElkArte forums on my phone. I'm impressed, their default theme is responsive and for the most part worked great on my iPhone 6.

Crates wrote:

fluffy wrote:Oh and if anyone has another forum that's worth looking at, let me know. I've looked at a bunch of them but haven't been impressed with anything really (myBB is the least-unimpressive pretty much).

Well, sir, I run the front-end dev department at the world's largest IT consultancy, and I was a core contributor to Drupal 7... so my vote is gonna be for Drupal, given that it ties in well with community management and will allow you to more tightly integrate the forum with other site features like your ability to manage the fights and submissions. I'd be happy to prop up a test instance for you on one of my servers if you're curious how that might operate. =)

From what I understand, Drupal is more of a general-purpose CMS framework, right? I'm not inherently opposed to that but that seems like it's not going to inherently solve any problems, and just creates more problems.

What sort of forum-type frameworks exist for it? And, my feeling is that since this is a side/hobby project for all of the admins, it'd be nice to limit the amount of administration and extension that's necessary in the first place - which is why I like turnkey self-contained forum systems.

(Also I have various feelings about using CMS frameworks for everything on a site - like, I don't like having to work within a specific framework that someone else has decided as being the perfect solution for every possible site, and anything generic enough to suit the needs of any given site had might as well just be an ORM and a template system... which has plenty of lighter-weight options available, like Flask, which I'm a huge fan of these days.)

fluffy wrote: From what I understand, Drupal is more of a general-purpose CMS framework, right? I'm not inherently opposed to that but that seems like it's not going to inherently solve any problems, and just creates more problems.

Sort of. If you just grab it and stand it up out of the box, then yes. However, with proper attention during the installation and set-up to the choices of which modules to use and how they interact, it's very possible to create a highly-customized experience that is very easy to use. Before I moved onto working with much larger companies, I did this for small and medium-sized businesses for around 3 1/2 years, and believe me, some of the people I worked with there needed the simplest possible solution to get their website operational; Drupal was exactly that.

fluffy wrote: What sort of forum-type frameworks exist for it? And, my feeling is that since this is a side/hobby project for all of the admins, it'd be nice to limit the amount of administration and extension that's necessary in the first place - which is why I like turnkey self-contained forum systems.

The "Forum" module comes right out of the box as one of Drupal's core modules, and it can potentially look a lot like this: https://www.drupal.org/forum. However, it can also look like whatever you want it to. I've used many CMS frameworks before, including most of the popular ones (ModX, Joomla, Concrete5, Wordpress, Collaborate, TeamSite, Hippo CMS and others)... but what I like about Drupal is that everything can be tightly integrated if done properly, and things are easier to find and maintain. In other words, if your existing SongFight.org home page were replicated, I would change a couple of small things: clicking a name on the song list would open a modal with an embedded player to run the file as-is (probably via JWPlayer), a link to download the MP3, a link to the artist bio (self-maintained), and two buttons at the bottom: a close button that simply destroys the modal and does nothing, and a close button that says, "I want to vote for this one!" which would destroy the modal and check that user's box.

Moreover, if you DO go with a CMS and it's set up properly, your artists would have the capacity to update their own artist bio pages, and you could prospectively automate the rollout of new fights so that you've pre-stacked a bunch of titles and they handle everything else automagically when the timer pops.

fluffy wrote: (Also I have various feelings about using CMS frameworks for everything on a site - like, I don't like having to work within a specific framework that someone else has decided as being the perfect solution for every possible site, and anything generic enough to suit the needs of any given site had might as well just be an ORM and a template system... which has plenty of lighter-weight options available, like Flask, which I'm a huge fan of these days.)

Hey, Python's great, no question. I've worked with virtually every modern programming language (save for the rather esoteric ones I haven't gotten around to yet, like Lua, Rust and Go). When it comes to building something rather large and deploying it quickly, however, I've found Drupal to be a MUCH faster solution. Without giving away too many details about Gartner's operations (where I lead the front-end team), I can say I build a prototype in Drupal last year by myself in two weeks that took our "enterprise-level" development team of a dozen Java and Oracle guys (part of our back-end team) 9 MONTHS to replicate as a bespoke solution.

It's totally your call. What I'm offering is to stand up an instance for you, customize it (for free, obviously) and let you decide if you like it. Although I'm not always here and competing, SongFight has been a source of great joy for me over the last decade, and if it weren't for you guys, we wouldn't have MC Frontalot, and PAX wouldn't be the same. So, I have a lot of love for this site. I'm happy to do it.

Hey Crates, I would love to see that test instance of Drupal, and thanks very much.

One thing I've mentioned recently is that even though there is the occasional hiccup, PHPBB has been really quite maintenance-light for us. Every so often we have to fix something but I bet there have been years when nothing was required, which I find amazing.

All the admins have day jobs in tech, so do please forgive any curmudgeonliness you may encounter as we come together to wrangle a good "next step" for Song Fight's forums. When people with a lot of expertise come together there's always a negotiation to help our minds meet and move forward.

JB