Geeklog Forums

I'm hoping to get a maintenance release out by the end of July, and a new version by the end of August at the latest. If anyone has any problems they found with the Glinks links plugin, please let me know here or on my site.

Also, I would like some feedback if possible - any problems, improvements, suggestions. Features I am thinking about (ie will implement in the next version):

* category security options
* category description text
* category logos/icons
* include a sideblock in the distribution

Any more? Can anyone think of a way to use usefully the centerblock functionality? Topics? Geeklog has lots of features; any way you want to see them made use of in this plugin?

Cheers,

Euan.

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-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

1) Photos/icons for each link (as an option) as well as for categories.
2) The ability to change the words "root" and "glinks" to something else (via the admin menu would be best IMO).
3) The ability to turn off the "(c:0, l:5)" in category names.
4) Adding a display of the top 10 links or something to the root category if there are no links in that category (like the default GL install).
5) User comments/ratings for links.
6) RSS feeds for link categories (and perhaps the top 10 links) and such via the Content Syndication features. If you did have a complete set of RSS feeds creating blocks for the links would be as easy as making a portal block.

All in all I think this is a great idea for a plugin, great work and thanks for taking the time to make it, and to make it available.

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Yes I am mental.

Thanks for the feedback.

1) will do - if I do it for categories, it will be no more trouble to do it for links.
2) done.
3) OK - never thought of that. Will do (admin option page).
4) OK - yes - will set as option in admin.
5) hmm....... maybe the next time. Let's go bite sized.
6) I'll look into it. Sounds like a good idea.

For the future, once all that is included and there's been a round of performance improvement etc., I'd really like to include something like bookmarksync (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookmarksync/).... which might all come together with the RSS stuff. But let's not run before we can stagger drunkenly. Thanks again for the ideas.

Cheers,

Euan.

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-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

To be honest the comments were just a thought, but it seemed like a decent idea.


Oh bookmarksync seems interesting. If you do get all the RSS stuff going you might want to look at how the SPAMX plugin shares its "blacklists", it seems to be an efficient way to sync rss files between multiple sites.

Also I had another idea which is proly one of those things for the future: I could see some sites wanting their users to be able to have their own private link categories, that they could choose to share with other users or choose to keep them private. I have often been on the road and wanted a bookmark from my work computer or vice versa. Perhaps bookmarksync combined with private categories would solve the issue, but if also had a option to keep some or all links private it would come in handy for me. Perhaps this is what you meant by "category security options" but just figured I would toss in my 2 cents.

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Yes I am mental.

When you write an article or create a link, you can set the owner (R/E) group (R/E) logged in (R) anonymous (R) rights. I was just going to set them to the categories as well.

Then, it might be possible to have an admin option to enable users to have private categories. They could then have their own private links collection. Probably create a top level "user" category that contains a category named for and private to each user. /users/euan, /users/drshakagee, etc. Because of the way that GL works, Root will always be able to see private links, but no user will be able to see other users' links.

If I were to allow users to create their own categories in their own private tree, I might need another security group.... but it shouldn't be hard. The code is already being used by the administrator after all.

Cool idea, thanks!

Cheers,

Euan.

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-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

I had another thought last night. I reckon if you put the actual url (http://www.blahblahblah.com) as the title of the link it would make them more search engine friendly which I know people are quite concerned with. So a link would look something like this:

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Yes I am mental.

Sounds reasonable.

Cheers,

Euan.

---

-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

I am just about to try Glinks (just realized I really need heirarchical link mgr - too many!) so please excuse if this is 'already in there'
1) Link integrity checking (reporting broken links to admin)
N.B. "great" would include not just 'pass/fail' but indication of any non-200 http response, such as 'the following pages had redirects, the following generated 404's etc etc - basically a list of pages by http error code...)
2) Paged link list (number of link items to show per page within a category, with "next/prev/page#" navigation
3) Ability to have categories displayed as images rather than text.
4) Automatic import of GL standard links data (this may already be there - I'm hoping!)

Hope this helps,

Joel

Just installed - ok - that's about as easy as it could possibly be -never mind #4!

Joel

A couple more ideas:
- Ability to change the display of category and link count (I'd like to be able to, for instance, make these non-bold so they don't interfere with reading the category title visually, or even may suppress them entirely in some cases)
- CLEAN URL's! Rewriting for links in the link farm so that the categories can be walked by the spiders. (I find a huge number of hits on Google for my current site based on hits that it finds in our link farm - which at the moment is static text pages - don't want to give that up.)

Thanks,

Joel

Another idea - how about the -option- to show the breadcrumbs as a heirarachy instead of just on one line, like this?

Main (root - whatever)
My Top Category
A Sub-Category

Unless the level of nesting is very deep I think this can be more expressive than in a line - fits the way non-programmers think about folders/categories...

Joel

Few more things:
1) Built-in option to suppress the Glinks menu item (had to manually force it to return null in functions.inc to make it go away - would be nice to just hit a checkbox in the plug-in config page). Why? Because on some sites the "link to glinks" is somewhere else rather than on the main menu bar, rather than having two-layer nav in the header.

2) When you select a new category from the drop-down list, I has initially expected that it would re-set the "Make a child category of" entry to show its current setting - but it doesn't! If you select a category, type in a new name for it, and don't recheck the bottom drop-down, when you submit the change the category is moved to "root" - surprise! While I now know to watch for this, I still make the mistake sometimes and in some cases it seems the entry then doesn't show up in the UI - forcing me to go in to the database and re-set the parent id pointer to where I wanted it to be. Hope this explanation isn't too round-about...
- Desired behavior: Selecting new category causes page reload (or new page) with current parent selected in the bottom drop-down.

Hope this helps,

Joel

Thanks for all the feedback guys! To summarise....

Coming next release (sorry, this won't be out for a week at least):

* category security options
* category description text (optional)
* include a top 10 links sideblock in the distribution
* customise menu title "glinks" and on/off option
* customise category title "root"
* fix bug where parent category option is not set correctly when editing link categories
* define text for "(c:0, l:5)" in category names (optional)
* turn on top ten links display when no links in category (optional)
* search engine friendly links (Joel - is this OK?) eg:


Sometime after that:

* category photos/icons (optional)
* private user categories (optional)
* link photos/icons (optional)
* bookmark synchronizing between server and local computer
* user comments for links (optional)
* user ratings for links (optional)
* link checking from admin panel
* RSS feeds for link categories (optional)
* RSS feed for the top 10 links (optional)
* breadcrumb customisation

Keep 'em coming....

Cheers,

Euan.

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-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

Just thought of something else. I have showed a prototype site that I'm working on to a few folks, and several said "well, why doesn't the category show the total count of -all- links under that category, rather than how many categories and how many links at just the next level?". Hmmm. Yes, it would be either a recursive query on the db (expensive at run time) or recaculating level-by-level aggregates at link addition time (expensive but not at run time), but I wonder if this is more like what users expect of a link count...

Your thoughts?

Joel

First off, bravo on a great mod. I love it and it's exactly what I'm looking for BUT I have a few questions :

1) Can I change it so there are only TWO columns on the Category listing page instead of THREE? This would help it fit in better on my site. Should be simple enough to do, I just can't find it.

2) I have category > sub category > sub sub category and it's only in the last sub sub that I have any links.

I would, however, like the l listing next to category names to show how many links IN TOTAL are within that category, including those in sub-categories.

Possible?

Thanks so much.

Yes, showing totals for all subcategories has been requested before - I forgot to add it to the list. How about that being one of the options for what to show next to the category:

- category options:
* show nothing
* show number of subcategories
-link options:
* show nothing
* show number of links in this category
* show number of links in all subcategories and this category

Then people with huge trees of links that would be DB intensive can turn off the total count, and everyone else can show the total links? I'll try and keep the count routine efficient of course.

Column view: will think about it. I'll include it in either this coming release or the one after. The code exists in the original links system, so it should be just a case of implementing it in the admin panel. Oh... no... you guys aren't thinking about user-level preferences.... are you... ?

Cheers,

Euan.

---

-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

That sounds good to me. I think I mentioned this, but it would be nice to either have the link totals always in "non-bold" or have that be an option. I think having them in bold along with the category names is sort of distracting. (just my opinion - others may like them bold)

Then people with huge trees of links that would be DB intensive can turn off the total count, and everyone else can show the total links? I'll try and keep the count routine efficient of course.



I hadn't been I don't see user-level preferences as a 'necessary'.

Regards and thanks,

Joel

I know I've been a bit slow on getting on with this, but I'm starting to get on with it at last. Most of the security stuff is done; I thought that since this is going to be a fairly big improvement on the last version, I'd try to get as much of the database stuff done and out of the way this time as well.

I'd like to know what people want recorded for links and categories. In the next release, categories will have the usual Geeklog security permissions, so people will not see what they shouldn't (at the moment they see empty categories as only the links themselves have security perms). For each link at the moment, I record:

- created date
- title (multilingual - been thinking about this for ages and since I've been beaten to it by the multilingual FAQ, I couldn't wait any longer )
- description (multilingual)
- icon
- category
- url
- hits

For categories I record:

- title (multilingual)
- description (multilingual)
- icon

If enabled by admin, users will be able to have their own tree of links. This is actually quite simple - they just are allowed to access a directory created by default as their ROOT directory, and can create dirs/links in that. I guess for that, I'll have to turn off submissions...(just thinking out loud here).

I don't see the point in having different icons per language, so I won't. I also don't see the utility in having hit counts for categories, or per language (although if enough people hassle me quickly enough I'll do it).

Because language is set by the user, and content is multilingual, I don't think that there is any point in setting a language tag for website content. Or is there? Do you want to tell your users that the site they're heading to is in Japanese only? What about something like the BBC in 47 languages? Sounds like a headache to/for me.

Any more for any more?

Cheers,

Euan.

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-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

The Glinks plugin is getting there. Progress update:

- category editor complete (fully multilingual titles and descriptions, full geeklog security)
- link editor complete (fully multilingual titles and descriptions, full geeklog security)

To do:

- sort out logic for showing links in tree (actually browsing the links)
- private user categories
- submission queue

So, not too long to go now. I'll post back when I need some beta testers. Soon there will be no excuse for using the default links system!

Cheers,

Euan.

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-- Heather Engineering
-- No job too small

can you please tell me how to add a bot to the show bot bay name fetcher