There's more to keep track of, but there's less work in any single abstraction layer to do. You probably want to learn mostly how the top layer(s) work without worrying too much about what the low-level storage modules do. Otherwise, if you ever decide to move to a different method (upgrade from DMB files to a real database or something), your hacks will cease to function.

Also, I would say that it protects you from yourself. :-) It is probably easier to write a good hack for iB than YaBB. The latter may be easier to hack, but I've seen a lot of hacks for the various messageboard CGIs that often were horribly coded but "somehow" worked because the messageboard was horrible code to begin with. With a properly written script, it might be harder for a beginner to modify things, but that probably that modifications that work well are actually well written, too.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^3: How about Ikonboard? by Aristotle
in thread What do people think of the YaBB forum script? by kiat

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