New Kid Intro / Coding style question

[TeddyBare69]

Hello all,
I have enjoyed lurking the past couple days but now I am ready to jump up and start contributing. I have my fair share of coding experience and enjoy it almost as much as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. PB&J still has a defect were it gets all over the keyboard though so nothing is perfect aranoid: I didn't find any hacks for that but I am going to keep looking
So not to waste too many electrons, I have been combing the vBulletin code and I am quite impressed. There is some pretty advanced concepts put together in extremely simple code. A very fine piece of artwork! My Congratulations goes out to the development team!
Enough brown nosing. Now down to business. I am a big fan of structure and objectifying application functionality. My style of designing and developing doesn't accomodate much else. In my past experience I haven't been able to get the "if else" combination to give me the same readability as a "switch case" combination can. I have looked at and installed a small set of hacks and have found a constant to be the "if else" combination. Is this a developers choice or are there some coding limitations within vBulletin that prevents "switch case" from working? There is very little performance increase if any that I know of between the two. I am looking only for more readability out of it.
My second question is why, in such an advanced system, are hacks installed by hand? With the advanced abilities of diff both on unix and windows and freely redistributable. Not to mention the advanced string replacement abilities that PHP posesses. A PHP diff hack or addition to the base functionality that put the meat of any change into a system. After that a site owner could then modify there own templates for placement of were the hack is displayed. Is this functionality planned for version 3.0 or is that top secret? :smoke:
I did do a search and found a hack created to do this. I am not sure if it was completed due to an overwhelming lack of interest? In an automated world, that totaly amazed me. With the write design this could allow for more complex hacks and put less of a support/documentation load on the developers of these hacks.

Thanks for listening. I hope to get to know you all and to see a great project grow into a full blown fully automated system that makes us all very rich someday. If anybody cares, I am shooting for tomorrow to be my day. Any help on that would be greatly appreciated. :nervous:

TeddyBare69