Development Diary

Taglines

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:43:28 GMT

I think it would be nice if we had some more taglines (the bit under "mosaik" up the top there). Any suggestons?

Tech Update

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:31:41 GMT

Following on from last week, and taking on board some of your ideas, I've put together a roadmap of what is still to come here. Since going live, we've already seen RSS and the basics of the channels system (in that there are some, but you can't yet edit any that you already own), a "logged in as" at the top of each page, plus fixes for comment administration and publishing unsaved posts. Here's the summary of planned updates, in the most likely order they'll appear: + Visible RSS links on pages. Right now, browsers can read feed information from the page haders, I'll add links where appropriate on the pages themselves. + Persistant logins. This is supposed to remember you, but for whatever reason it doesn't so I'll use a different implementation. + CAPTCHA tech on posts and events, to allow for non-member commenting. + Better channel administration, allowing for renaming and control over public posting/viewing/feeding. + A "while you were away" section, which can be used to show content that was added since you last logged in, and highlight posts with new comments. + Managed content for static pages, so we can edit the about page and other static text content without editing the page source each time. + Additional fields on member profiles. Pretty much a key-value system, where members define the fields as they go along (eg email, messenger, web site, whatever), with optional obfuscation for easily spammed fields like email addresses. + The media gallery. An evolution of the old Mosaik image gallery, and at first just for images, giving members a tool to upload images which can then be resized by the server for displaying in posts, using as your profile pictures, etc. This development will give us the code we need to build some extra toys: ++ Upload your own profile picture from the profile page. ++ Browse images already uploaded, and upload new images, from the post writer, with tools to insert the image into your post text. ++ Random sidebar image linking out to the rest of the media gallery. + Basic WYSIWYG editing for bold/italic/underline/colour, and hyperlinking. + Visual tweaks, the first suggestion being the login/member bar at the top being a different colour. All suggestions welcome on this one, I can see it being a series of incremental changes over the coming weeks. I'm not going to put timescales on any of this stuff, but I'd imagine the first few points up to but not including the gallery will be this week, then the gallery might take a couple of weeks, and we're getting into Christmas territory after that so don't expect the last couple of points too soon. Lastly, if you do have any more stellar ideas (or even ideas for more taglines), let us know.

True To Form

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 17:25:14 GMT

It just wouldn't be a new Mosaik without downtime, would it? Something relating to the power to the racks broke earlier today. It's been fixed now, obviously. But there is good news. The keen-eyed amongst you will have already spotted that there are now RSS feeds for every channel and for events. You might also have spotted that members can create their own channels; this is useful if you want to use the RSS feed to power your own site. You probably haven't noticed that the edit/delete comment links have been fixed. And you won't have noticed that most of the text content (the pages, the css files, the feed xml files) are now GZip compressed, which means you should find the site loads even faster than before. Should. Maybe. Might ;)

New Mozzy

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:27:29 GMT

Evening folks. Here's an even-more-basic version of Mozzy, that will over the next few weeks become a verifiable ground-zero of new feature infestation. But now that it's up (albeit in basic format) I need to go eat something. Catch you later. Update 30.11.2007: Just thought I'd post a bit more about what's coming up here. If you look over to the right, you'll see a placeholder telling you that there are no upcoming events. I've built an events system that works a lot like the posts system (largely because it's a copy/paste of the code), and any upcoming or recent events will display in the sidebar. You will be able to go into an event and (assuming you're logged in) flag up whether you're coming, thinking of coming, or definitely not coming. There's the standard comments system too for discussion. I've built but not published an RSS system which each channel exposes, and a separate feed for events. These again are built but not published, expect to see them this weekend. On the subject of channels, the channels system is all built and working (the home page is actually just a skin on top of http://www.mosaik.org.uk/channels/1/), and members can add/edit channels as they see fit. They can allow other members to post to those channels too. If you go to write a post now, you'll see that alongside the standard save and preview buttons, you've got a publish option. If you don't publish a post, it won't ever appear on mosaik, even though it's in the database. In this scenario the post is a draft. And then there's the image section, which is a bit less complete. I'd like to have a gallery system where you can upload images, have them auto-resized, then when you're writing a post be able to insert the image into your prose through the UI. I'm aware of all the bugs you're going to tell me about (the auto-save being a bit intrusive, edit/remove comments giving a 404, etc), but I'll get them fixed up in the next few days. Finally, I will add a captcha and enable anonymous commenting in the next week or so.