Forums / Cotonti / General / What to do with one month of spare time?

12>>>

GHengeveld
#1 2012-06-24 12:49

Since I'm almost done with my Bachelor study of Mediatechnology (my final presentation is this friday) and the job I've accepted will start on August 1st, I'll have one month of spare time. I intend to spend some of this time working on Cotonti projects, but I'm undecided on what projects to do so I'd like to know your opinion.

I have several projects that I've started in the past but never really completed, including Advanced File Manager (PFS replacement), Share (a framework for sharing things like pages/files/etc. between users), Notifier (automated email notifications; needs an upgrade to Siena) and Find (complex search engine for Cotonti).

What should I work on:

Something else? Let me know.

This post was edited by GHengeveld (2012-06-24 13:09, 11 years ago)
fraze
#2 2012-06-24 12:57

would it be possible to do the avatar selector you mentioned in my other thread :)

GHengeveld
#3 2012-06-24 13:03

That will be this week, since I need it for my final presentation ;)

Twiebie
#4 2012-06-24 15:01

Definitely improvement of the forums module. It's so outdated compared to forum software that's out there nowadays.

If you decide to go for improving the forums module, I can share some ideas I talked about with Kilandor.

GHengeveld
#5 2012-06-24 15:56

Interestingly, the forums module is largely responsible for Seditio's/Cotonti's popularily, since it used to be one of the best forums systems around and it's one of the few forum systems that tightly integrates with your website. This is also one of the reasons why I put it on the list. I think it's one of Cotonti's main selling points but has been overlooked for too long, so it deserves an update. On the other hand, there's lots of other areas that need an update, and the forums module isn't that bad as it is.

Kingsley
#6 2012-06-24 16:15

Do the forums, would be my first choice.. But a nice and clean basic skin (for developers) would be nice too.

You know, something that a) addresses all needed things, but is very marginal and clean, so it can easily be used to use as a base for a new theme.
Now I use nemesis as a base, but I still end up cleaning alot.

And I was thinking about this: How about a (small) plugin that extracts all tags from other modules/plugins and displayes them all sorted out by plug name. (this is merely an idea, dunno if something like that would even work/is possible, and must be usefull for others too, ofcourse)

anyway, these are my ideas to keep you occupied :) hope it helps :)

Good luck on your presentation Gert.. Congratz on finishing and the new job!

Twiebie
#7 2012-06-24 16:24

The forums module has indeed been a good feature of Seditio and Cotonti, but in my opinion it's lacking some basic features that you get out of the box with other forums systems nowadays.

Things like:

  • Subscribe to topic. Notify with instant notice, daily digest, via PM or email.
  • Icon in topics row showing to yourself if you already posted in a topic previously.
  • Nested quotes.
  • Reputation system allowing users to give a +1/like on a post. Bit like Trustmaster's 'Thanks' plugin, but show this per post so others can see the value of a post.
  • Option to quickly share a topic via social media and email.
  • Feature for users to rate a topic.
  • Filter threads on last so many days, rating, number of replies, number of views.
  • Feature for notifications when somebody quotes one of your posts, or replies to one.
  • Ability to use coloured usergroups. Useful for community websites with lots of different ranks/groups.

Just throwing in some ideas here.

Dayver
#8 2012-06-24 17:25

I think of your entire list of the most important three things:
1) A centralized extension repository
2) Documentation / Articles
3) Notifier plugin + HTML emails for Cotonti

Pavlo Tkachenko aka Dayver
Eugene
#9 2012-06-24 17:51
#34767 GHengeveld:

Something else? Let me know.

API for Cotonti is really interesting. I may be wrong, but this can be great for building apps that will sync with cot-web-site. I develped small app for Android which was taken json from cot - but through simple plugin. I would be interesting to see that in the core and done right way.

Repo for plugins is not what i extremely need - but that obvious need of newer part of the Cot-community. It is still not easy to look for plugins on cotonti.com.

I hope that month will be good investment of time! ;)

GHengeveld
#10 2012-06-24 18:05
#34778 Twiebie:

Things like:

  • Subscribe to topic. Notify with instant notice, daily digest, via PM or email.
  • Icon in topics row showing to yourself if you already posted in a topic previously.
  • Nested quotes.
  • Reputation system allowing users to give a +1/like on a post. Bit like Trustmaster's 'Thanks' plugin, but show this per post so others can see the value of a post.
  • Option to quickly share a topic via social media and email.
  • Feature for users to rate a topic.
  • Filter threads on last so many days, rating, number of replies, number of views.
  • Feature for notifications when somebody quotes one of your posts, or replies to one.
  • Ability to use coloured usergroups. Useful for community websites with lots of different ranks/groups.
  • Automatic notification via email for subscribed topic is part of Notifier plugin, so your vote should go there for this feature.
  • Topic icons are already there, but may need to be extended.
  • Nested quotes is tricky for templating, but I agree it's annoying to have only single-level inline quotes. Still I don't think this is the most important issue to work on.
  • Reputation system and rating posts is an interesting feature which I'd like to implement similar to the way Tweakers.net has done for comments on it's news articles.
  • Social sharing should be implemented as a plugin. Not really high priority.
  • Filtering is a nice power feature, but not really a neccesity. Probably better to implement this as a plugin or part of a search module.
  • Colored usergroups is a template thing. I'm pretty sure you can do this already.
Twiebie
#11 2012-06-24 18:30

Sounds reasonable, Gert.

I think most of it should be as a plugin so admins can decide for themselves if they want to use a feature or not.

Indeed the reputation system on Tweakers.net is very nice, it would be awesome to have it implemented in Cotonti.
Talking about Tweakers.net; I think it would be a good idea to add Cotonti to the 'meuktracker' there.

Trustmaster
#12 2012-06-24 18:37

Congrats with the job, Gert!

First, let's take a razor and cut off things not worth the effort:

  • AFM. It is tedious and will take quite a lot of time to adopt, make a PFS replacement based on AFM. Definitely, not a one-month project. While some efforts for making third-party file management are being made: elFinder and Dragonzap's PFS.
  • Sphinder - the project is almost dead.
  • E-commerce module. I know of at least 3 parallel e-commerce developments for Cotonti which are in progress, some of them for years by now. And none of them have been released as a module that you can install and use. Every single customer has his own requirements and making a universal solutions costs a lot of time, at least several months of intense development.
  • Extensions repo - it is important, but it is a post-1.0 task and it is likely to take long.

Then, here is the list of things mentioned above of the highest priority in my opinion:

  • Mobile theme.
  • REST API.
  • Notifier, Share and Bootstrap - yeah, it would be cool to have these finished.
  • Documentation / Articles - yeah, but we should know what exactly to focus on. Keeping the articles contest in mind too.
  • Find - it would be perfect if it was as custom-fitted as the search plugin and as relevant and reliable as Google. If it can't be achieved, then we may replace it with a Sphinx-based module (at least on this site and for other happy VPS owners).

 

Added 19 minutes later:

#34778 Twiebie:

The forums module has indeed been a good feature of Seditio and Cotonti, but in my opinion it's lacking some basic features that you get out of the box with other forums systems nowadays.

Things like:

  • Subscribe to topic. Notify with instant notice, daily digest, via PM or email.
  • Icon in topics row showing to yourself if you already posted in a topic previously.
  • Nested quotes.
  • Reputation system allowing users to give a +1/like on a post. Bit like Trustmaster's 'Thanks' plugin, but show this per post so others can see the value of a post.
  • Option to quickly share a topic via social media and email.
  • Feature for users to rate a topic.
  • Filter threads on last so many days, rating, number of replies, number of views.
  • Feature for notifications when somebody quotes one of your posts, or replies to one.
  • Ability to use coloured usergroups. Useful for community websites with lots of different ranks/groups.

Just throwing in some ideas here.

  • Subscribe to topic. I hope Notifier will do that. I also have several related plugins planned, including recent activity and event tracking on site, but those get postponed regularly.
  • Icon in topics row showing to yourself if you already posted in a topic previously. Nice feature request, please add a ticket on GitHub!
  • Nested quotes. Now that we have tamed our bbcodes and parsers, I think we can ease this restriction and add an option to allow nested quotes. Add a ticket, please!
  • Reputation system allowing users to give a +1/like on a post. I can add thanks count display to pages/posts/comments, but I warn you ahead that this will add a lot of SQL queries in forum topics and page comments (if enabled). If the goal pays the price, then add an issue to my thanks plugin.
  • Option to quickly share a topic via social media and email. Social media buttons are usually made right in the templates. I've also seen some social buttons plugins. Maybe email feature is missing.
  • Feature for users to rate a topic. Does rating the first post as a topic count?
  • Filter threads on last so many days, rating, number of replies, number of views. Is it what forumtopicsearch did? More specs please, maybe as a separate topic.
  • Feature for notifications when somebody quotes one of your posts, or replies to one. Depends on notification plugin. First the plugin should emerge, then this feature should be implemented in it.
  • Ability to use coloured usergroups. It is easy at a fast glance but it actually isn't. To apply colors correctly, you need to pass user's main group to cot_build_user() function, which normally takes just user's ID and name to display. This means that all calls to cot_build_user() must be changed and all queries which provide the information which is then used in cot_build_user() should be changed to include user's group too. This actually means that the users table should be joined whenever a user ID appears in a relation (while currently it isn't to reduce SQL load). An "easier" solution which I've seen in many existing corehacks for colored usernames is to fetch user's group from the database on every cot_build_user() call, which adds as many SQL calls as the amount of usernames displayed on page. So, it hasn't been done so far because an optimal solution of this problem hasn't been found. 

 

May the Source be with you!
This post was edited by Trustmaster (2012-06-24 18:56, 11 years ago)
Twiebie
#13 2012-06-24 19:48

Added 19 minutes later:

#34778 Twiebie:

The forums module has indeed been a good feature of Seditio and Cotonti, but in my opinion it's lacking some basic features that you get out of the box with other forums systems nowadays.

Things like:

  • Subscribe to topic. Notify with instant notice, daily digest, via PM or email.
  • Icon in topics row showing to yourself if you already posted in a topic previously.
  • Nested quotes.
  • Reputation system allowing users to give a +1/like on a post. Bit like Trustmaster's 'Thanks' plugin, but show this per post so others can see the value of a post.
  • Option to quickly share a topic via social media and email.
  • Feature for users to rate a topic.
  • Filter threads on last so many days, rating, number of replies, number of views.
  • Feature for notifications when somebody quotes one of your posts, or replies to one.
  • Ability to use coloured usergroups. Useful for community websites with lots of different ranks/groups.

Just throwing in some ideas here.

#34783 Trustmaster: 

  • Subscribe to topic. I hope Notifier will do that. I also have several related plugins planned, including recent activity and event tracking on site, but those get postponed regularly.
  • Icon in topics row showing to yourself if you already posted in a topic previously. Nice feature request, please add a ticket on GitHub!
  • Nested quotes. Now that we have tamed our bbcodes and parsers, I think we can ease this restriction and add an option to allow nested quotes. Add a ticket, please!
  • Reputation system allowing users to give a +1/like on a post. I can add thanks count display to pages/posts/comments, but I warn you ahead that this will add a lot of SQL queries in forum topics and page comments (if enabled). If the goal pays the price, then add an issue to my thanks plugin.
  • Option to quickly share a topic via social media and email. Social media buttons are usually made right in the templates. I've also seen some social buttons plugins. Maybe email feature is missing.
  • Feature for users to rate a topic. Does rating the first post as a topic count?
  • Filter threads on last so many days, rating, number of replies, number of views. Is it what forumtopicsearch did? More specs please, maybe as a separate topic.
  • Feature for notifications when somebody quotes one of your posts, or replies to one. Depends on notification plugin. First the plugin should emerge, then this feature should be implemented in it.
  • Ability to use coloured usergroups. It is easy at a fast glance but it actually isn't. To apply colors correctly, you need to pass user's main group to cot_build_user() function, which normally takes just user's ID and name to display. This means that all calls to cot_build_user() must be changed and all queries which provide the information which is then used in cot_build_user() should be changed to include user's group too. This actually means that the users table should be joined whenever a user ID appears in a relation (while currently it isn't to reduce SQL load). An "easier" solution which I've seen in many existing corehacks for colored usernames is to fetch user's group from the database on every cot_build_user() call, which adds as many SQL calls as the amount of usernames displayed on page. So, it hasn't been done so far because an optimal solution of this problem hasn't been found. 

I will add tickets for those requests you mentioned.

I think the advantage of a reputation system that shows likes/+1's/thanks per post is that other users can easily see how valuable a post is. Let's say somebody is asking for support and a user replies with the correct solution, other people can give the post a +1 so more users can easily see which post is helpful. I'm not sure how much the performance decrease would be with those extra SQL queries, but I think the goal is worth a few.

Maybe this gives a better indication of a few features:
cot-forums-features.png

 

This post was edited by Twiebie (2012-06-24 19:57, 11 years ago)
GHengeveld
#14 2012-06-29 21:27

Okay, so now that I'm done with my studies (graduated with an 8 out of 10) I've decided which projects to tackle this month.

First I'll start with modifying the userimages plugin to support default (pre-uploaded) avatars. I intended to build this for the app I made for my graduation, but didn't find the time to do it.

Second I'll work on Notifier. I intend to make it generic so it will work for comments, pm's and forums, but can be easily extended for other things. Where needed I'll update Cotonti's built-in email system to properly support rich HTML email. Notifier will support both plaintext and HTML email. Perhaps I'll also include some form of click-tracking into the emails, but I'm unsure about the added benefit of this feature. The new Notifier will no longer support sending PM's rather than emails.

Finally I'll continue work on the mobile theme based on jQuery Mobile, but I'm not sure I'll be able to finish it.

The REST API is an honourable mention, but I don't think this is what most people need right now.

Macik
#15 2012-06-30 11:29
#34823 GHengeveld:

Second I'll work on Notifier. I intend to make it generic so it will work for comments, pm's and forums, but can be easily extended for other things. Where needed I'll update Cotonti's built-in email system to properly support rich HTML email. Notifier will support both plaintext and HTML email. Perhaps I'll also include some form of click-tracking into the emails, but I'm unsure about the added benefit of this feature. The new Notifier will no longer support sending PM's rather than emails.

Is Notifier will use old SendMail or be extended to use SMTP (as option) ?   As my own SMTP preferred not only for speed, but as more freindly for SPAM protection and other ban system. (As a practice SendMail letters are often blocked as spam by mass mail services. In addition foreign SMTP server can be improoved with SPF and DKIM).

Добавлено 3 минуты спустя:

If it will not use SMTP is there any ability to make a hook, so I can extended «sending routine» to simple change sendmail with own code (by adding additional plugin).

https://github.com/macik
правильный хостинг — https://goo.gl/fjCa1F

12>>>