What to do with one month of spare time?

Trustmaster	#34783 2012-06-24 18:37
Administrators Thanked: 263 times	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)

Trustmaster

#34783 2012-06-24 18:37

Administrators
Thanked: 263 times

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)