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Another 2.4 Development update.
Nathaniel:
Well, its been a fair while since the last update. Almost 3 months in fact, isn't it funny how the time passes!
Anyway, onto the actual development update...
Naturally SimplePortal 2.4 will be fixing all the bugs with SimplePortal 2.3.x, as well as adding some important new features. Many of these bugs have already been fixed and committed to the alpha version of SP 2.4. The minor feature additions will come over the next weeks. If you have any suggestions for feature additions then please post them in the Feature Requests board. We're always looking to improve SimplePortal with minor feature additions!
Some of these minor feature additions will be:
- A more powerful way to define Custom Display options, most likely with PHP, so that admin can decide the exact locations where a block is shown.
- An update to the Permissions system for SimplePortal, so that Admin can hide blocks from themselves.
- New header/footer sides, that appear above and below the current SimplePortal sides.
- An updated Blog block, that supports SMFBlog and PmxBlog.
- New article blocks which connect your portal to the new article features. (as of yet, the exact blocks haven't been decided, any suggestions would be welcome!)
MORE importantly, SimplePortal 2.4 will be focusing on the long awaited improval of the SimplePortal articles system. Only having articles that are attached to SMF topics is a bit dry, SimplePortal 2.4 will allow that, and more. A separate articles area or page in your website will allow your users to add articles that can use BBC, HTML or even PHP (admin only). These articles will each belong to a category. This category will define how the article is published and how the user can create articles, as well as all the permissions of the article. Some categories may require articles to be published from the admin panel, or even moved to that category by an articles moderator/admin. Each article will also be able to have comments and attachments. Along with a powerful permissions system, the articles system will be made to be simple, yet powerful!
In fact, if you think about it, you could just rename 'Articles' to 'Blogs' and have your very own blogging system! Also, if you've ever wanted a SimplePortal page which allows users to leave comments, then the Articles feature will let you do something very similar, the possibilities are endless! ;)
The development team is still finalizing the ideas surrounding the components of the articles feature, so any feature suggestions or requests related to articles would be most welcome.
The slackers over on the marketing team (they must be slackers if they don't exist ;)) have told the development team to write development updates more often, so expect another one over the next week or two as the ideas (and hopefully the coding) for SimplePortal 2.4 start to see light (some of them have been sitting in dingy old development topics for a while now).
grafitus:
Beautiful thoughts those... SP 2.4 will be very good!
MultiformeIngegno:
Awesome!! :)
If I'm not wrong I remember you were going to add also an option to display blocks collapsed by default (will be great!!)! ;)
ccbtimewiz:
Looking good, just a few questions...
--- Quote ---- A more complicated way to define Custom Display options, most likely with PHP, so that admin can decide the exact locations where a block is shown.
--- End quote ---
Perhaps it was a poor choice of words on your part, but could you elaborate a bit on "complicated"? I thought SimplePortal was supposed to be simple as opposed to complicated.
--- Quote ---In fact, if you think about it, you could just rename 'Articles' to 'Blogs' and have your very own blogging system!
--- End quote ---
Indeed, though a question remains: Why are you including in-built support for other blog mods when you could market the articles feature as a blog in of itself?
Nathaniel:
--- Quote from: Kristoph Gavin on April 28, 2010, 12:33:11 AM ---
--- Quote ---- A more complicated way to define Custom Display options, most likely with PHP, so that admin can decide the exact locations where a block is shown.
--- End quote ---
Perhaps it was a poor choice of words on your part, but could you elaborate a bit on "complicated"? I thought SimplePortal was supposed to be simple as opposed to complicated.
--- End quote ---
It was indeed a poor choice of words (I updated the post to change 'complicated' to 'powerful'). The intention is to make the custom display options more powerful. Doing this will add some complexity, of course. The dev team decided that its better to use Php as most admin will be more familiar with that, rather than create our own more complicated syntax. Essentially you will be able to use PHP boolean statements to choose where the block is shown. Its likely that you will still be able to use the current syntax for the options as well.
--- Quote from: Kristoph Gavin on April 28, 2010, 12:33:11 AM ---
--- Quote ---In fact, if you think about it, you could just rename 'Articles' to 'Blogs' and have your very own blogging system!
--- End quote ---
Indeed, though a question remains: Why are you including in-built support for other blog mods when you could market the articles feature as a blog in of itself?
--- End quote ---
You raise a good point. The answer depends on how the SimplePortal articles feature develops over the next weeks, and how easy it is to make it work like a blogging system. We may remove the blog block altogether or replace it with a similar block for the SimplePortal articles feature. For the moment, that is one of the minor feature additions that are intended for the next version, flowing over from the minor features thought about for SP 2.3.2, this one didn't get included because we wanted to get the numerous bug fixes out as quickly as possible.
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