If you have subforums with code replicated / repeated in other areas, that’s one issue. If you have a MOD that installs a “tooltip” for the topic that’s another MOD. Unless that MOD is written to be compatible with subforums, it won’t be. That’s not what the MOD-CE is designed to do.

What it is designed to do – at it’s most basic level – is determine if two (or more) MODs can be installed without conflicts. It doesn’t attempt to – nor will it ever attempt to – see if two MODs will function together, that would be nearly impossible.

For example, consider the following two mythical MODs. One opens index.php, finds a specific line (let’s say line “300″ because it doesn’t really matter what it is) and before that line adds this code:

$myvar = FALSE;

Next, MOD #2 also finds line 300 and before it adds this:

$myvar = TRUE;

Now clearly these two MODs will conflict functionally, but they can both be installed at the same time. Whichever MOD is installed last will “win” as to which value is set to $myvar.

The purpose of the MOD CE as I plan to deliver it is to find a set of MOD and determine if they conflict with their installation instructions. There are rules that I have determined and coded that say exactly what a conflict was, in short it’s based on detecting replace operations that update overlapping blocks of code (where a “block of code” could simply be one line.)

In other words, there’s no way that I can see – short of writing some sort of code parsing engine that actually understands what the code is doing – to detect and react to the situation you describe.

Guess what, I also have a subforums MOD of my own, and it has major portions of index.php replicated in viewforum.php. Now, try adding the last topic tooltip to the forum list – and you’ve missed the subforums…

I realize that subforums are an extreme (this is probably the reason for CH to eventually become a phpBB2 fork), but more common examples can be thought of, the Attachment MOD being a good starting point .

First, I have my own subforums MOD that is similar in functionality but substantially different in code from the subforums MOD released at phpBB. I intend to offer (here at this site) very few MODs that are not written (or rewritten) here. I don’t plan to rewrite the attachment MOD, for example. But by doing that, and by keeping this process in mind while writing those MODs, some of these issues can be addressed.

But the real solution to this is that the MOD CE doesn’t go by FIND commands, but by the results of the FIND commands. When a MOD is added into the MOD Manager (which is the source data for this system) each FIND is tagged based on the core code from an unchanged phpBB board (current version). The results of that process drive the compatibility check.

In other words, the MOD CE does not attempt to install every MOD that is selected, it anticipates what would happen and records conflicts (or at least potential conflicts) based on that process. So it’s a bit different approach than what I think you were envisioning.

Thanks for your comment. It’s refreshing to see one actual comment mixed in with the 30+ spam comments that my spam-catcher is processing.

However, there will also be false negatives. When a piece of code is replicated by MOD A (e.g. a subforums MOD), you won’t be able to identify MOD B (e.g. a tooltip MOD) missing it.