TBDev vs Gazelle

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Dollarbill2

New member
I never understood why so many non-coders hate Gazelle (well coders as well since TBDev is a convoluted piece of crap but that could be chalked up to experience). It's such a better organizational system for pretty much everything. The only place where it would be less necessary is for 0-day only sites, the "Artist Page", tags, and collage features make the organization of music, movies, and TV infinitely better.

Also while fewer mods are available for the code, that can be solved by having a coder who knows what they're doing rather than a "coder" that just sticks pre-made mods into vanilla TBDev. Gazelle also comes with things like the invite system and passkeys built in, so it's not like TBDev where you install it and you literally have a forum and a browse page. Gazelle comes with enough stuff in its basic form not to completely fail, so anyone who can actually work with the code can turn it into something great.
 
I've worked with both so here's what I'll say. They clearly both have their ups and downs, but I like tbdev more (we use TBDev with an XBTT backend at PiN).

TBDev is easier to work with quickly because there isn't much to it. ...But it's a mess. A huge mess. It takes a lot of dedication to clean it up into something good. A nice thing is that there is much more support for TBDev than for gazelle and many little addons that are pretty neat. It is also fairly simple to create your own addons.

Gazelle is much more organized than TBDev, but in a really weird, almost mazelike way. Every file redirects to another, so that it takes a long time to get used to the code. I used to think that good themes had to be impossible with gazelle because all the most beautiful sites use TBDev, but that is not the case. The design is very versatile, but not very easy to work with. Cool things can be done with if you're good enough.

It all comes down to preference. They're both very different. I'm hoping that someone can come out with a third source with the best of both worlds.
 
Title says it all. Tell me which you like the most and explain your reason behind it.

I personally don't know much about either of them and am looking forward to the community's opinion and feedback. I did hear that Gazelle is a monster to code while TBDev is easier to customize. But then, that's all from what I read and heard.

Edit: Thanks to however added the poll!
edit:ur welcome ;)
 
ca_aok said:
I never understood why so many non-coders hate Gazelle (well coders as well since TBDev is a convoluted piece of crap but that could be chalked up to experience). It's such a better organizational system for pretty much everything. The only place where it would be less necessary is for 0-day only sites, the "Artist Page", tags, and collage features make the organization of music, movies, and TV infinitely better.

Also while fewer mods are available for the code, that can be solved by having a coder who knows what they're doing rather than a "coder" that just sticks pre-made mods into vanilla TBDev. Gazelle also comes with things like the invite system and passkeys built in, so it's not like TBDev where you install it and you literally have a forum and a browse page. Gazelle comes with enough stuff in its basic form not to completely fail, so anyone who can actually work with the code can turn it into something great.
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For you to set up gazelle you actually need to edit the code. It come's ready for you to run what.cd anything else you need to modify the core. Which is just sucks, never mind the fact it results in devs doing months of work when a new verison comes out, look at all the sites moving to rc 2 (rc my ass). Then there is using html inside php code. Template systems were created for a reason. Gazelle is good for what.cd but it needs serious work to be a proper release/package.

I also have a hate for working with 3rd party apps. Only plugin system I've liked so far has been wordpress's.
 
TBDev is much older than Gazelle ..;)
i think Gazelle has a lot of exploits & bugs, sure TBDev has also, but they are working on it since the beggining, and no, it's not wise to take a 'patched' TBDev source .. it is better to take the RAW source and patch it yourself ;)
 
backie said:
For you to set up gazelle you actually need to edit the code. It come's ready for you to run what.cd anything else you need to modify the core. Which is just sucks, never mind the fact it results in devs doing months of work when a new verison comes out, look at all the sites moving to rc 2 (rc my ass). Then there is using html inside php code. Template systems were created for a reason. Gazelle is good for what.cd but it needs serious work to be a proper release/package.

I also have a hate for working with 3rd party apps. Only plugin system I've liked so far has been wordpress's.
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I'd agree with you on most of that. The Gazelle releases are basically a snapshot of What's code minus some of the juicy features. It does take work to modify it to fit your db structure and to modify all of the references from What to your own site, but that does have the side effect of getting you more familiarized with the code itself (which is good due to its decentralized nature).

I'm hoping that their new style of release will prevent another big jump like that from RC1 to RC2. Let's face it, the RC1 code was from over a year ago and there was no possible way they could've made any sites running on RC1, especially after these sites modified it for their own purposes, to make the jump to RC2. With incremental builds that should be a bit less of an issue.

I highly doubt most of the naysayers in this thread are going to code gazelle sites though, which is what really confuses me. I've noticed a huge backlash towards Gazelle with many regular torrenters, I'm not sure if it's that they're so used to TBDev sites they can't accept the radically different layout, or if they're just sort of bandwagoning with the others (in the case of this thread).
 
There's nothing wrong with the features Gazelle has.

The only thing I hate about it is the messy code layout. Reading the thing is like a nightmare.... I tend to use Paracetamol when coding Gazelle... :wacko:
 
I would imagine the reason is most sites doing the moving were using TBDev before Gazelle was released, hence only one way to go (or not). What's your point again?

stoi said:
From a programers perspective they are both a nightmare to work on
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That's subjective. One could argue that they're both extremely easy to work on if you're a skillful coder.

As for the original question, the Gazelle source is probably written better than TBDev, but then TBDev has a huge library of available mods that are not available for Gazelle. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter which source you go with. The source provides only a framework, and well coded sites modify it to the extreme.
 
From a users perspective, no idea, as i have never actually used gazelle, even though we have it installed we havnt done anything with it yet.

From a programers perspective they are both a nightmare to work on, but TBdev is designed from the get go to be an everything tracker, and just delete/edit cats in the db to what you want, gazelle is designed to be a Music tracker, and its not very easy to change it to what you want (you have to edit files not just the database, its not impossible but its a lot harder.

Tbdev is pretty resource heavy unless you go with an XBTT backend.

Gazelle is fast because it comes with an XBTT backend, and you have to have memcache on your server to use it (TBdev you dont).

So it all depends on a few factors for me.

How good of a programmer you are?
What you actually want your tracker do do, Music go with gazelle, everything else TBdev unless you can put the hours in changing Gazelle.
How many peers you want, 20,000 or less go with TBdev, 20,000-100,000 go with either TBdev or gazelle but both with XBTT. 100,000 or more, Gazelle (even though TBdev will go past 100,000 i would have thought gazelle can hanlde more.)
 
elbuitre said:
For a specialized site Gazelle is godsent, but for a general site i can see it being a nightmare. How do you group apps? Do you have group for a program then have a version as an "album" then different releases under there. Or each version of the program has a page? How about coding the implementation for each category of torrents, are they compatible? I guess you could disable that sort of grouping but I mean, if you're not going to take advantage of gazelle organizational features, why use it at all.
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Grouping is a feature, not forced. Look at Torrent-Damage and TorrentVault for good Gazelle 0day examples...

Imo: Gazelle > TBDev, for it's features and the fact that it's not ancient. The coders and staff are way more important than the source code though, imo.
 
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