Quote:
Originally Posted by NOBLE
That's not true. There will be a mobile site, probably at some point in 2018. It is already under development, and everyone currently on staff has seen it and knows what I'm talking about.
Before I went to jail, I had almost completed a mobile site based on the Zurb Foundation framework. X decided to start all over from scratch using Bootstrap because it is more cohesive with the later versions of vbulletin which we plan on upgrading to because those are also built on Bootstrap.
I know from personal experience that rewriting the front end is not hard at all. The hard part will be coding some of the new features we plan to have. Also, if and when we upgrade vbulletin, we are likely to lose a lot of features we currently enjoy because they come from mods and plug-ins for which there are no equivalent in the latter versions.
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I mean, I guess you can just set size limitations in the HTML and create a responsive site like that, but that's a pretty crappy way to build. PHP is a pretty old language and doesn't really have any of the advantages that a modern framework would have.
I'm not a PHP guy since it's an older paradigm that I don't really see a need for in the modern day, but here's what I see wrong with doing it that way....
Lack of newer plugins and packages due to PHP being outdated.
A responsive PHP/HTML would struggle a lot with speed because of too many calls to the api due to the lack of a proper state container.
Lack of mobile browser caching beyond what HTML provides that I'm aware of.
Lack of a single page design that would limit calls to the server.
Speed is the name of the game in mobile, and PHP sacrifices a lot of the advantages that most pages get in the modern era.
I have spent a lot of time working on front end architecture, and I really think that building a site of this size in PHP is a really bad idea. For a real mobile site, to me you would rewrite most of the front-end.
There are some sites out there that PHP is still useful for. Letsbeef is probably not one of them, I think it's too large and complex for a really good PHP mobile app. Other frameworks were designed largely to help deal with complexity on the frontend.
A LB mobile site today would better than what we have now, but I strongly suspect would struggle with performance. Ideally the site would be re-written for mobile, but that's a lot of work and I guess I get why that won't happen.