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Mon Sep 17, 2007

Textpattern Sept ToDo List

This post is a reminder for myself and a teaser to the few that venture here from the Textpattern forums.

This list has already expanded well beyond what can be accomplished by the end of the month. I’m going to keep adding to it, so the ideas stay in the same area.

Ideas/Plans (In no particular order)

  • Add a view for protected articles with a link next to each rule to show all articles in the Content.Articles list. Maybe even an easy button for hide/show all matching articles, kinda like an uninstall safety.
  • Move the privileges over to their own tab, Admin.Groups.
  • Roll the Edit Link plugin in to the core, since I already moved the ign_password_protect functionality in to the core.
  • Add tab Admin.Javascript that will get loaded for all admin tabs. Removes the need for many plugins to handle simple admin-side tweaks. E.g. On write tab, always show keyword, timestamp and uncheck timestamp reset.
  • Get a proper todo list or project tracking app. Options:
    • Add a “Todo” section and use articles.
    • Create mem_todo plugin with separate tables and such.
    • Create a plugin to interface RememberTheMilk or one of the many other todo list apps.
    • Set up a SCRUM tracking app (PPTS).
  • Plugin/Mod to mimic the Wordpress Page functionality. I really hate having to create a section for “About” and other singular entries. This might just be support for a url mode of “/article-title”.
  • Change the Category Edit button so it opens in a new window instead of making the user lose what they’ve currently typed. I still fall for this every so often because my roots are with MT. Done
    • Change this to a javascript popup form to add a new category inline. Why force a flip-flop between pages?
  • Article versioning. The old versions should probably get auto dumped to a separate history table, so all plugins and tags are not broken. Crockery Patch
    • Maybe something along the lines of txp_revisions (id, type, version, modified, user, base64(gzcompress(seralize($thisarticle))) ) to allow for future (and plugin) modifications to the textpattern table. Done
    • A class that can accurately diff an article. The “*_html” fields are not really important. (probably not going to implement this)
    • A link in the write tab that will bring up a list of all revisions for the current article. Done
  • Merge DB tables txp_page, txp_form, and txp_css. link
  • Multi section support for txp:article_custom tag. Done.
  • Paging and search support for Admin —> Users.

Community Suggested

  • Display article image on write tab. When mousing over the article image field, use jquery to fetch the image thumbnail and display it.
  • Logging of admin interface actions. This would require an additional logging table that holds txp_user, ip, date, event, step, and a (localized) programmer created message about what changed.

Posted 05:56PM | |

Comment

hur
ray!

— Alicson · 09/18/07 10:39 AM · #

Michael, I like the category edit change -I’ve always felt this was a bug actually, and of course just plain annoying.

Some other ideas:

- display the article’s associated photo on the write page (maybe there’s already a plugin but I couldn’t find one)

- notice on each page reminding you of the last action you did in that particular admin area e.g. if you’re in privs it would say: John Smith was added as a Features Editor on [date, or 2 days ago]

I could think of many more but those 2 are crucial I feel.

— Garrison · 09/20/07 02:00 AM · #

Garrison, both are good suggestions.

I am unaware of a plugin that will display an image on the write tab. This can be accomplished with either javascript or php, but I think I’ll aim for a javascript solution so anyone can use it without having to work with my forked code.

— Manfre · 09/20/07 08:57 AM · #

interesting! are you considering joining the txp developer team?

— stevelam · 09/25/07 02:30 AM · #

I’ve been submitting patches and writing plugins for many years, but no offer to join has ever been extended. If they want me to join, they know how to reach me.

— Manfre · 09/25/07 09:22 AM · #

Excellent ideas. The items marked “done” — are they built into xPattern? Or are they incorporated in your plugins?

— Raina Gustafson · 01/30/08 03:08 PM · #

They are all built in to this site. I’ve been running a modified version of Textpattern for a while. I’ve submitted patches for a few, but I don’t remember seeing any of them in the Textpattern SVN logs. I didn’t get any acknowledgment either, so I have no idea about their status. Many of the changes will need to be merged in to xPattern.

— Manfre · 01/30/08 03:12 PM · #

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