October 19, 2018 at 4:24 am
I posted a note in another thread and got this note from Jeff, so responding here:
Thanks, Steve,
I hate to be a cynic but I have to ask... what current functionality will be lost and what will the gains be? Of most importance is the ability to copy and paste code directly from SSMS without it doing things like stripping leading spaces that destroys properly indented code or that combines multiple adjacent spaces to just one, which destroys "squared up" code. It would also be nice of the correct colors for code were maintained and those would be whatever colors someone has setup in their instance of SSMS. Pasting pictures is also a very sought after feature. Of course, the ability to quote other posts, either in part or whole, and the ability to post links is also very important.
October 19, 2018 at 4:29 am
First, to answer Jeff's questions:
No functionality should be lost, either in the main site or forums. We have contractors working to match the functionality we have now, hopefully with a few improvements, but the goal isn't to change things too much. It's to replace what's there.
Background
There are substantial changes coming from Google (and likely Bing) that have a high preference for sites that produce a mobile version. The existing nHibernate (main site) code doesn't render well on mobile, and it's substantial work to add that. This is an older version of nHibernate, and we have limited resources internally for this technology. We've had a few outside consultants look at it, but it's a substantial project. In addition, we would still be dependent on external resources.
We do have internal WordPress resources, and have moved both Red-gate.com and Simple-talk.com to WordPress. Between styling and plugins, this has been a success. As a result, and with the recommendation of a consulting firm, we decided to move to WordPress. There will be some styling changes, but this should be minimal. In addition, with Project Nami (https://github.com/ProjectNami/projectnami), WordPress has been ported to run on SQL Server. There isn't a lot of db stuff in WordPress, so this isn't much of a concern.
There is work for plugins to get the different article types, the briefcase, the Questions of the Day, etc. moved over, and we're developing items here.
We hope to get a beta site ready in Nov and a deployment by the end of year.
October 19, 2018 at 4:36 am
Re: Forums
As a part of this decision, we re-examined the idea of sticking with InstantForum for our discussions. This has been one of the better forum software choices for SQL Server, but it has some flakiness, specifically with the cut/paste from SSMS (Which is really horribly broken in many ways), but it's a problem. This does render on mobile, but it's also a source of problems as any changes we make preclude upgrades from the vendor, so we try to minimally touch things.
Our outside consulting firm recommended bbpress, which is the forum software that WordPress.org runs. That has scaled well, and our initial looks at it gave us confident it will work for our load. This is also ported to SQL Server for us.
As far as styling and cut/paste, we're working on that. The idea is to move more formatting to stylesheets, and handle some cut/pasting in. We'll see how well this works moving forward. I don't know yet if we'll get WYSIWYG, but we should be able to color style the code if it's marked as SQL code.
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