The Future of Serendipity

[Fabien]

Hello,

I would like a really professionnal serach function as described in this post : http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=10810
Pleaeaeaeaease !

I would also like to have the possibility to insert easily footnotes in the entries.

Cheers, Fabien

[gimmel]

My Username ist gimmel. „Michael Kaiser“ is the display name.
Where should I submit patches to? To your email address? Into this forum?
(Sorry, if this is a stupid question. Until now I ever did my programming alone and never in a group.)

[garvinhicking]

Hi gimmel!

Patches can be announced here in the "Development" forum. That is a good place to discuss from developer to developer and add contributions.

I'm looking forward to your contributions!

Best regards,
Garvin

[johncanary]

Hi Gimmel!
Hi Garvin & Co.!

I agree with you that S9Y is a superb piece of software. Thanks to
Garvin & Company. Seems like Garvin has become a synonym for
S9Y.

I also appreciate that Garvin stated to some change/feature request
earlier, "No way,... S9Y is about compatibility!".

Anyway, Gimmel, as others have pointed out. You address a lot of
Template issues here.

One especially caught my attention, because I needed to solve it myself.

• Email subscriptions
  
  • Subscription emails should be template based. Those standard mails
    are a bit ugly. Very important: the mails have to contain the comment
    text! It's not very handy to have to click and open the web browser for
    every short comment to read.

Having the body text in there certainly increases usability. But another
issue is legal.

• It cannot hurt to include a physical address of the person/organization
  that is responsible for the Blog. I actually think (as non-lawyer) that
  it is required.
  (CAN-SPAM act in USA, and I am sure there is an even more stringent
  law especially in Germany and the rest of Europe.)
• Add some sort of disclaimer (especially, if you don't previously moderate
  the comments.

Udate:
Just saw the TO DO LIST

• What other developers might want to do/help with
  High-Priority
  
  • Documentation, more Details on plugins, Details on
    Plugin updates (abdussamad, TKS)
    my comment: "Very good, better doku on plugins is
    much needed!"
  • A new 'manage mail subscriptions' interface where visitors can see their
    comment notifications (Robert Lender, Joaquin)
    my comment: "User's should be able to configure a
    SIGNATURE for those emails (optionally being able to turn on/off body
    of comment for email."

I have a fix for this issues and just opened new thread for it.
http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?p=76868#76868

Still would be great to have this in the config menu in the admin tool.

Yours
John

[johncanary]

First: Thanks to Garvin and the team for this superb
piece of software.

Secondly: Thanks to the community (including the
developers) for driving the development.

Great suggestions already. I comment some and add
others.

... Also, the static pages
plugin has become way too complex compared to regular
posts, all those settings can make static pages really
hard to learn for newbies...

I have the plugin installed, but didn't use it so far,
becasue I did'nt want to play around for hours (I would
not consider myself a newbie, just someone, who wants
to get any job done quickly. Docu for that stuff
definitely would help (as a minimum).

...With the mulitlingual plugin
and posts, I'd love to see these show up in the 'edit
entries' page without having to first go into the
default language and then change the language. I know
this might be a lot of work but it would help make s9y
into more of a multilingual cms instead of just a
blog...

S9Y is developed in Europe, therefore, I think it makes
perfectly sense to improve usabiity and features for
multi lingual support.


Mobile device support

Something I see coming is the need for ubiquitos device
support a lá CC/PP (Composite Capabilities/Preference
Profiles) with different sets of templates. (I did not
digg into it on how well that is supported so far or
what a workaround could be).

Same URLs, but templates served based on
browser/medium (whatever) detection.
E.g. full fledged with two sidebars versus mobile with
just the header and main content.

Having timed entries would be cool as
well.

You can pre-date entries in Serendipity since version 0.2
And you can use the "outdate entry" plugin to unpublish those entries, if you want.

Didn't know of the outdate entry plugin.
Anyway, the problme is that certain functions are not
perfomed, when you
publish a post with a future date. (Let's assume it
doesn't show until its time has come)

• pings are not sent
• no trackbacks sent
• sitemap not updated
• and maybe more 'pluged-in' functions not performed.

Any solution to that?

Probably something like a queue that hold those tasks
and a cron-job that checks on a regular basis, if a new
post has gone live in the meantime.

*Internal podcast support (this could be
done through a plugin)
Perhaps making a distinction between a post and a
podcast...

That sounds interesting, but isn't it better to have
your podcast spread via one of the many podcast
directories? (I guess I sshould have read about the
podcast format first)


PHP code insertion

Last but not least, I'd love to be able to occasionally
add PHP code in the entry or sidebar for things that I
don't want to solve with <iframe> or Javascript.
Maybe there is already a solution for this.


Summary Archive across years

An Archive view that shows all posts sorted by
descending date in the summary mode (just date, title,
author)
Paginated, if more then #MAX# entries.


That's it for now.

Yours
John

[garvinhicking]

Just a quick note about subscription comment mails: s9y 1.4 already supports an option to include fulltext comments. Making the comment mail a template should be doable, I added it to the list.

@johncannary: There is both a include PHP event AND sidebar plugin so that you can inject PHP code includes.

[gimmel]

PHP code insertion

Last but not least, I'd love to be able to occasionally
add PHP code in the entry or sidebar for things that I
don't want to solve with <iframe> or Javascript.
Maybe there is already a solution for this.

Look here.
Some things are not easy to find, some of them are in the FAQ, some in the „Technical documentations“, others in „Expert“.

I like the fast and easy way to include PHP as Smarty functions in the config.inc.php in the template folder.

[johncanary]

...Making the comment mail a template should be doable, I added it to the list.

@johncannary: There is both a include PHP event AND sidebar plugin so that you can inject PHP code includes.

Using a mail template is as fine as it can get. Great.
The sidebar plugin should work fine for me.

Look here.
Some things are not easy to find, some of them are in the FAQ, some in the „Technical documentations“, others in „Expert“.

Thanks for the tip. I already used smarty functions, but did not think
of the sidebar plugin.

Any short comments to the other points:

• Mobile device support and
• Timed Entries

Yours
John

[garvinhicking]

Hi John!

There is the mobile_output s9y plugin which deals with mobile support. I havenot fully checked it out yet.

Timed entries remain a problem. Emulating cronjobs is quite hard,I know noreally good solution to that.Creating a plugin thatruns from a true cronjob should notbe too hard.

Regards,
Garvin

[gimmel]

Emulating cronjobs is quite hard,I know noreally good solution to that.

Perhaps it sounds too easy, but what about storing simulated cronjobs in the database an doing a timestamp query for them in the index.php.
The downside: If nobody views the blog, the jobs will not be executed, but so what? Nobody will see it. The first time someone calls it, the jobs will be done.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Something like that already exists with the s9y cronjob plugin. But as you mention, the problem is if nobody visits the blog, this is not really useful. You can never rely on the action to be performed at the point where you want to.

Adapting the cronjob plugin to be able to execute scheduled trackbacks for entries in the future should be possible...

Regards,
Garvin

[johncanary]

Hi Garvin, Gimmel!

I appreciate you're getting back to me. Shame on me
that I didn't check the current list of available
plugins first.

• Mobile Output plugin, good to know, I might
  check it someday.
  
  If that doesn't work well enough one might be able to
  add media detection and forwarding into the
  index.tpl template, just throw out the sidebars
  in the mobile output or do something similar. (Probably
  that's exactly what this plugin is doing.
  
  I guess no reason for the core team to 'play' with this
  now. (But as mobile devices become more common, it
  might get interesting.
  
• One could setup a cronjob that visits the
  Blog with curl for example every now and then, and
  have those trackbacks, pings executed and sitemaps
  updated for timed entries.
  
  I should check out this cronjob plugin. And I should
  check out, how they do it in wordpress (if they care
  about it at all. honestly I don't know.)
  
  
• About the summary archive, that I mentioned. The
  titles only view in the archive is very useful and
  would be even more useful, if you could see all
  content instead of only a month at a time (paginated, if
  necessary).
  
  I might look into this myself, but not before autumn.
  It's for sure not too complicated to do.

Update:

• Carl galloway said something about the permalink structure. My wish in that respect:
  
  Being able to freely set the {title} as used for the Permalink.
  

  Code: Select all

  E.G.
  
  Title of Entry:
     Winning strategies, tactics, and tricks revealed. Get it Now!
  
  Normally translates to URL:
     .../winning-strategies,-tactics,-and-tricks-revealed-get-it-bow!
  
  Would love to be able to set it permanently to 
     .../winning-strategies-tactics-tricks-revealed

  
  In WP they call it 'post slug' I believe.
  With the HTML Meta Plugin you can change/set the <title></title>
  
  I think that one could be awesome.

Have a nice weekend
Yours
John

P.S.:

• I am happy to read that you're improving the static pages and entries properties plugin. I think that's quite important. I vote for having those plugins installed by default.
  
  Both plugins offer lots of functionality, which is quite useful. They offer more than WP has to offer in that respect, which makes it necessary to include some sort of docu, at best accessible from the new/edit page admin menu.
  
• I read "Feedburner replacement for s9y, to count RSS statistics (Dr. Love)" Update: I just read the German thread. I vote this one down. Don't see the need for it, either. Privacy? Internet is about transparency and social proof. Get 5,000 regular readers, stick the damn Feedburner counter logo there, and then it will mean something.

[/list]

[gimmel]

Hi!
Something like that already exists with the s9y cronjob plugin.

That's funny. I NEVER thought of installing this, because my hoster does not allow (real) cronjobs. So it seemed to be useless.
Good to know it's doing simulated cronjobs. (A proof for the need of better documentation… )

[Andyman77]

Many thanks Garvin & for a superb programming.

One feature I would like is to have the option to integrate FCKeditor into S9y with greater ease. This editor now supports pretty much every browser.

Every time there is an update of FCK, I have to go and edit the FCK config files all over again.

I'm sure there should be an easier method to complete this.

Another feature would be the ability to 'compress' css files into 1 file at load up time. Maybe also do the same for JS files.

Just my two cents.

[judebert]

Something like that already exists with the s9y cronjob plugin. But as you mention, the problem is if nobody visits the blog, this is not really useful. You can never rely on the action to be performed at the point where you want to.

Hmmm. Doesn't FeedBurner (or some other RSS service) visit the blog on a regular basis? If we hook the RSS visit as well as the web visit, we might actually be able to create a semi-reliable cron.