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Some wishlist suggestions
Hi all,
while I don’t post here often, I use Textpattern on an almost daily basis. I’ve compiled a wishlist of features which I would at some point love to see implemented, either in txp core or as plugins.
I would be interested in any voices for or againts the things listed in the post, comments and suggestions. The trick is, being a university lecturer I can have some of my students help with some of the things ;-)
Premek
“So, where is the patch?”
((former nick pbrada))
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
- definitely agree on your point of unifying the method of creating new pages/forms/styles/etc. some of them having “Create new” and others only having “Copy As” are kind of odd to me. either all should have both options or just one of them. other areas that could be unified better are the actions you can perform in the each of the article/file/image areas. you should be able to select multiple images just like you can select multiple articles and delete/change author/change category for all of them. currently you can do this in the article area but not the image or file area.
- you could use tame_privs to edit access rights in the backend though admittedly it is still rather raw in usability terms.
- as for debugging/polishing css issues, i always use firefox’s web developer plugin to tweak my stylesheets with a live preview, and then just copy and paste it into textpattern when i have what i want, rather than editing the css textarea directly and having to save/reload each time a change is made. of course if you choose to use actual css files, then you get both the performance boost and happy live-ftp editing capabilities all in one.
- of course subsections are definitely a must as well.
- i know rss_unlimited_categories handles the limitation of the current max of 2, but i wish it would also display the same info in the categories tab area (i know the plugin uses separate tables so its not possible out of the box). right now if you’re using the plugin, every article category in the admin category tab is listed as all having 0 articles. it just feels kind of ‘wrong’ to me to leave it like that.
hopefully the ever mystical crockery version will cover these issues.
i’m just curious, what is your source mod you’re using to achieve “sort of” clean urls for your otherwise messy url scheme?
Last edited by iblastoff (2007-11-01 17:13:45)
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
Hierarchical sections (subsections).
Wet is working on this, won’t happen in 4.0.x
File-based CSS in addition to the database-based
I absolutely agree. In fact, I already did that on undented.com (as a plugin), because the CSS was slowing us down. Simple really, instead of just storing it in the database, it’s also saved as a file.
Simple way to augment lang strings, primarily for plugin use – from a file or from an URL so that plugin author/translators can publish lang strings online.
I don’t think I understand what you mean here.
Unlimited categories instead of the two.
I’ll be working on that in crockery (not just for articles)
Option to upload images and files into database, instead to filesystem, for hostings which restrict PHP’s privileges.
Use a different webhost. Especially for images it’s horribly inefficient. Not so much fetching the image from the database, but the overhead of a PHP script that is executed for each loaded image.
Clean up the db tables/schema, mainly what things are used as IDs. The current use of text fields for keys seems to me, well, primitive (section name is the best example).
When implementing subsections and unlimited categories I think most of those things will be taken care of as well.
Ability to edit access rights from admin backend
Good idea, perhaps even fine-grained on a per-user basis.
View count for images
Same as storing images in the database… not efficient. Would work only for low traffic websites.
Uniform way of creating new things – pages vs forms vs styles vs sections
Yep.
Section editing a la pages/forms/
More like categories, I think. With multi-edit option.
[the above is my personal opinion, not necessarily that of the TXP dev team ;)]
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
ruud, thanks for the positive feedback; it’s giving me some hope that in future releases we may see more profound changes than the “slight polishings” so far (granted, the key amount of work has gone into improving internal quality of the code, which I applaud).
A few more comments below.
Premek
Simple way to augment lang strings, primarily for plugin use – from a file or from an URL so that plugin author/translators can publish lang strings online.
I don’t think I understand what you mean here.
I meant that now, you can install lang strings either from the rpc.textpattern.com server – which works well for the core txp distribution – or by putting lang file into the ./textpattern/lang/ directory. However, if there is an admin-side plugin which cares for L10N, it is very cumbersome to load its lang strings from a file.
What I would imagine is to have in the Admin > Prefs > Langs tab an “upload lang file” option, to open lang strings file and put its contents into the prefs table. Of course, fine-tuned options like “do/don’t override existing strings” would be handy in this case as well.
Option to upload images and files into database, instead to filesystem, for hostings which restrict PHP’s privileges.
Use a different webhost. Especially for images it’s horribly inefficient. Not so much fetching the image from the database, but the overhead of a PHP script that is executed for each loaded image.
OK, that’s true. Maybe it’s really a singular problem of mine, in a situation where the host in question provides free PHP hosting so using any different one is several orders of magnitude more expensive ;-)
View count for images
Same as storing images in the database… not efficient. Would work only for low traffic websites.
Well, but then again plugins that supply the functionality (dzd_counter_view, jas_popular_articles) will slow things down as well. When the visitor log is up it means a DB insert every time a page/article is loaded; so something could be cooked up like aggregating all image and article displays during response generation and storing these counts in one go at its end. OTOH it’s true that download counting is far more interesting than image views counting.
Section editing a la pages/forms/
More like categories, I think. With multi-edit option.
Yes, actually :)
“So, where is the patch?”
((former nick pbrada))
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
iblastoff wrote:
(…) other areas that could be unified better are the actions you can perform in the each of the article/file/image areas. you should be able to select multiple images just like you can select multiple articles and delete/change author/change category for all of them. currently you can do this in the article area but not the image or file area.
Good idea, true.
i’m just curious, what is your source mod you’re using to achieve “sort of” clean urls for your otherwise messy url scheme?
It’s actually just about 6 lines of code; I’ll post them here later on.
Premek
“So, where is the patch?”
((former nick pbrada))
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
ruud wrote:
File-based CSS in addition to the database-basedI absolutely agree. In fact, I already did that on undented.com (as a plugin), because the CSS was slowing us down. Simple really, instead of just storing it in the database, it’s also saved as a file.
I would love to have the option to save everything (forms, pages, styles) to the file system with the system taking care of syncing it up with the DB like Movable Type does. I know originally that wasn’t seen as ideal because it required changing file system permissions which can be confusing to some but maybe it could be an option which is turned off by default?
Shoving is the answer – pusher robot
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
^^ I actually meant it the other way around. TXP manages the CSS, but stores it both in the database and as a static file (which is faster/lighter for a webserver)
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
very nice ruud. is this plugin available for public consumption?
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
It doesn’t meet my quality standards for a public release. It’s a small plugin which has 1 line of documentation (“Want help? Ask Ruud”). The CSS directory is hardcoded and it does make some assumptions that are perhaps not as user friendly as it could be (basically, only when you hit the save button, the CSS file is updated, so when installing the plugin in an existing TXP install requires hitting save for each CSS file). Are people interested in such a plugin?
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
hell, i wouldn’t mind having it for myself if no one else wants it :) i’m sure i can change the location of the hardcoded css directory on my own.
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
@ruud: I would rather see it the other way round, to sync the DB when the file changes, for reasons outlined in my original blog post. But I see the value of the plugin for performance reasons, so I’d like to give it a try.
BTW, how do you include the css into a page? By simple absolute/relative URI pointing to the generated file, or via a modified <txp:css >?
“So, where is the patch?”
((former nick pbrada))
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Re: Some wishlist suggestions
iblastoff wrote:
i’m just curious, what is your source mod you’re using to achieve “sort of” clean urls for your otherwise messy url scheme?
I put the section-title messy url mod at my site; it’s a diff of three 4.0.5 distro files.
Premek
“So, where is the patch?”
((former nick pbrada))
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