Bulletproof - General

Bulletproof development history

nospam@example.com (Matthias Mees) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:52:00 +0100

I bet a lot of people have been wondering what that extremely long thread in the s9y Themes forum ‘Brainstorming: What do we need template-wise?’ is all about, but never found the time or courage to read it from beginning to end At the time of writing this, the thread has 600 replies and 31777 views, it extends to 41 pages and has been going on for about seven months.

Well, this thread is where the magic of Bulletproof happened, it's where it all began with an initial post by me. Basically, I was looking for inspiration, ideas for new s9y templates, trying to figure out what kind of templates were needed. A lot of people chimed in on this suggesting various things. Somehow, this all ended up in the decision to start a ‘template framework’, a base template which would be a good starting point for new templates.

Since than initial post, seven months have passed, and now Bulletproof is finally finished (Well, more or less ). Here are some memorable dates from this long development period:

Jan 23: That was the day I posted a request to the Themes forum on board.s9y.org to brainstorm about template needs
Jan 26: the first bulletproof zipfile is available
Mar 12: switching the feed icon for colorsets works
May 11: the customizable header image works
Jun 11: the documentation blog is up and running
Jul 24: first snapshots of the new admin template
Aug 24: the final Bulletproof v1.0 zipfile

So, it's been quite a ride. We've hit some rough patches along the way, it's been frustrating sometimes, but also a lot of fun. Hopefully, this will also be a lot of fun for the people using it as a template or framework

Browser Compatibility

nospam@example.com (Don Chambers) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 05:19:00 +0100

PC or Mac? Windows or Linux? Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari?? Browser specific "hacks" that do not validate, or clean code that breaks in non-compliant, or outdated broswers???

It can be a serious challenge coding both the front and back ends of a template to be fully compatible under every possible hardware and software platform. Browser versions themselves can present their own unique challenges. I cannot begin to imagine the billions of development hours that have been wasted thanks to Microsoft!!! But I digress....
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Bulletproof - what is it?

nospam@example.com (Matthias Mees) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:28:00 +0100

Bulletproof (bp) is a template framework, which means it is, on the one hand a template for the weblog engine Serendipity (s9y), and on the other hand is meant to be used as a framework to build new templates for s9y.

The Bulletproof developers' primary design goal was to create a template which is, well, bulletproof!! It should be able to create any of the "classic" website/blog layouts, in any popular browser, on any popular platform, without falling apart. The developers are fairly confident that we have achieved that goal, but of course nothing is 100% certain.

Bulletproof makes great use of s9y's "theme options", so users can now configure almost any desirable option using just the administration panel. There is almost no need to edit any of the template's core files. Of course we cannot cover every specific custom feature every user might desire, but we are fairly sure we have covered the most desireable features.

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