Last night marked the biggest milestone in SMS 3 to date: the completion of our first development milestone.  M1 was mainly about getting things set up and in place for continued development, but regardless, it was a great step forward and I’m excited about moving in to M2.  Stay tuned to the blog and forums for an exciting announcement later this week about SMS 3!

The title says it all.  We’ve gone in to SMS 3 with a keen eye toward making sure the system can be expanded on with little to no effort.  Of course, I should have prefaced that statement by saying “if you know what you’re doing.”  Even still, expanding SMS 3 is going to be a lot easier than it’s ever been in the past.  No more tinkering with core files, no more overwriting files that we might update, none of that.  Gone is the cat and mouse game of Anodyne releasing new updates that wipe out changes someone might have made to one of their files.  Now, we can do our updates and assure developers that users aren’t going to have to re-do all their MODs and updates after every patch we release.  So what areas are we focusing expandability on?  Here are a few.

Skins

I’ve talked about it on the blog and the new SMS 3 preview site talks about it to: seamless substitution.  In a nutshell, you can just drop an image, Javascript file, or even view file into the appropriate directory in your theme and the system knows to use that instead of the system default.  It really is just that easy.  Now, that will only work for that specific theme, but the principle is that if a skin developer wants to use a series of icons, they can easily do that.  If a skin developer wants to put an icon in where the system doesn’t have one, that’s pretty easy too.  Just drop the icon into your theme’s img directory and copy the necessary view file(s) from the global repository into your skin, then finally, add a reference to the new icon and BAM, you’re up and running.  What’s even better, doing things this way means that we can update something in the global repository and your skin isn’t affected.  It’s a beautiful thing!

The CI Core

Hooks, plugins, and extending classes all mean that the CI Core (and SMS 3 core by proxy) can use hooks, plugins and extended classes to take what we’ve built and add to it.  Controller methods (read the individual pages) can be replaced with a user’s controller method, or they can add new ones.  What’s even better, we’ve included two files for every controller.  We’ll only ever update the _base.php files, meaning that anything you put in the controller file will stay intact regardless of updates (assuming you don’t accidentally overwrite the file).  No more worrying about wiping out your new pages and/or MODs when we release an update!

Globals and Messages

In the past, SMS’s globals and messages tables have always been fairly closed affairs.  We didn’t recommend adding globals to the system, nor did we recommend adding messages.  Well, that policy is going to be out the window with SMS 3.  We’ve completely rebuilt the schema for both tables, meaning it’s as easy as adding a new row to the tables to have a new system global or site message to use.  Each global consists of an id, a key (usually a single word), and a value.  The system is given the key and grabs the value from the database.  It’s really just that easy.  On top of that, we’re actually going to provide an easy-to-use interface right in the the management sections for globals and messages to add new ones.  We haven’t figured out the globals stuff yet, but in terms of the messages table, it’ll just tack your new message on to the end of the page, and then, you can add the key to the code and be all set to go!

We’ve made this expandability stuff a major priority in SMS 3, and as you can see already, we’ve got some great things in the pipeline for making that a reality. 

Just a quick updates on genres (since that’s the single largest feature in SMS 3).  As of today, we have Battlestar Galactica completely done and working.  The DS9 genre is just waiting on a few position and department tweaks, but the ranks are done.  The Enterprise genre is waiting on a couple position and department tweaks and then it’ll be finished.  Finally, the Romulan genre came together in a gorgeous way and I think the Romulan sims are going to love it.  I’m actually considering a Romulan MOD it’s that good.  So those are the “done” ones: BSG, DS9, ROM, and ENT.

The Original Series stuff has been started, but no significant progress to speak of.  Stargate has been started and I’m weeding through a whole series of sources to get the most accurate picture I can.  Babylon 5 is about in the same boat; I have a bunch of research that’s been sent to me, but nothing down in the genre file yet.  So those are the “in progress” ones: SGA and B5.

We’re (potentially) adding two more genres as well.  There’s been an interest on the Kuro-RPG forums about my request for information, so we’ll see what comes up.  I can tell you that people are working on an Andromeda version as well as a Halo version.  There could also be a Starcraft version in the works as well.  Very cool stuff.  This means that the list of “confirmed” genres has expanded to the following:

• Enterprise
• The Original Series
• Movie era
• DS9
• Romulan
• Klingon
• Bajoran
• Cardassian
• Battlestar Galactica
• Stargate Atlantis
• Babylon 5
• Halo
• Andromeda

In addition to those, there are a few more that could make it as well:

• Vulcan
• Future Star Trek
• Covert Ops (Star Trek)
• Starcraft

As always, if there are other suggestions or if you want to help out with compiling genre data, just drop me a line.