Hi all.

Since Geeklog 1.3.10 is in the pipe I guess at the moment there is no development for aditional features, more for making the current version perfect. So I was wondering what will be next under development?

Of course I am among other reasons asking since I have posted a major list of feature requests to the project homepage in the recent weeks.

On the one hand I would like to contribute to the development, however I am afraid my coding skills are only good enough to write a small plugin.

On top of the list are the things that didn't make it into 1.3.10, specifically saving stories as PDF and support for PHP sessions (maybe even a complete overhaul of the aging sessions code).


That list is getting a bit too long for my tastes, so it's about time that we do something about it. Unfortunately, GForge doesn't (yet) have a feature that lets you vote on bugs and feature requests.

So we would need a way to come up with a list of, say, 10-15 feature requests which we could then put into a poll here on the site. Any suggestions on how to achieve that?

That shouldn't been taken as a guarantee that the most voted-for feature request will be implemented, though. But we'll discuss that once we're there ...

Of course, we will also continue to pick up suggestions or patches "on the fly" and as we see fit. Often, someone posts something that's so blindingly obvious or simple that I have to wonder why nobody has thought of it before ...


Contributions are always welcome, whatever form they take ...

bye, Dirk

Well I just uploaded a beta version of a backup plugin that should fill a gap on your tasklist. It works fine as far as I can see now, and with 1-2 small editions it will be final version. please feel free to put it into the core.

I would suggest that we filter the re-producible bugs and somehow feasible feature reuqests first. There are some which seem more for GL2 than for the next version.

We could assign importance 1 to the ones we do not see in the above mentioned, and 2 in those that we see. Then we get 4-6 people together which all add one importance level to all those they prefer to be done soon. The top 10 will make it to the poll

how about it?

Interestingly, the Mambo guys have decided to get rid of the PDF functionality because of various problems. IIRC tables caused lots of problems.

thats strange. I am using a php>pdf library myself and tables are no problem at all.
I guess in the end it depends what you want to use as a converter.

Nevertheless I think PDF conversion is a big problem-creator. There are too many formats and components in HTML that will not be rendered properly.

The question in the end might be if you are happy with a PDF-function that simply cannot handle all HTML out there or just dont do it then...

(oops, I double-clicked "submit".... should this not impossible due to spam-time-limits?)

Well, I'm also not a fan of PDF. What I think, PDF isn't the best way for keeping stories, or even making archieves. I've allways uses plain text to do that, because of compresibility and regexp functionality. Also HTML code is just a pure text


Talking about backups - changing the naming schema is good think. But mysqldump works fine, so I don't see the need to get rid of it. It's stable enough, even under Windows And don't forget - this tool comes as a part of MySQL installation, what prevents for uncompatibility

About new features - maybe implementing WYSIWYG stories editor (or even all textboxes as a WYSIWYG editor) is worth of look? I've added this functionality in my site and it works just fine for me. If You want look at it - look here: http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/.

Regards

My opinion is that saving as PDF is not very interesting because most people cannot edit a PDF afterwards, perhaps it's better (and easier?) to let people choose to save a story as HTML/RTF/TXT. I've seen a dutch jobsite offer something like that.

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Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

I believe the feature has been implemented to offer a new icon by the story for the reader. So they can email it, print it or create a PDF of it on the fly. I don't see it as an issue and offers users options.

I know it would be welcomed for my Intranet users.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

This was a request from the core dev. Team on the project site. Aparently not all users have access to the mysqldump due to hosting restrictions.
Since the class that enables to do it through PHP is just a opensource class from freshmeat, and since it works fine, I dont see a reason why not to offer it to the users.

Doh, sometimes administrators forget about existing of the users But without the users there will be no need for existing of the administrators

My memory of Mambo's PDF problems served me badly. Tables were not the problem - on the contrary! Non-table designs using DIVs and images were the culprit.

Anyway, Mambo currently (4.5.1a) has functionality exactly like Blaine's description, i.e. an optional icon for generating the PDFs on the fly. And because of the bad quality of many generated documents, they have decided to get rid of the functionality. Perhaps they will reimplement it later. There is a long discussion on their forums.

Cheers,
Jens