Here's a plugin idea I've been thinking about, but I don't know if it's possible or anyone would want it.

A rating system

The use case that I'm thinking of is plugins.b2evolution.net. It would be nice if I could post a plugin description there, then users could rate it. Out of 5 stars or 10 points, or better yet something that could be defined in the plugin settings (I give this post 645 out of 666 demons, or 37 out of 42 cups of tea). Each user rating could be submitted along with a comment. Or it could be done another way. But the post would always show the average of all the user ratings. You would also want ways to sort posts by rating. Maybe list the top five rated posts in the sidebar.

I don't know if there are plugin hooks that could make this happen. I guess you could use the Install event to add a rating column to the comments table, then use SkinTags to do the rest. What do you think?

Once again I just thought I'd bring all y'all up to speed.

Now that we've started to publish posts, and ping to the world, I've disabled all skins and feeds except the am skin and the rss2 feed until I have a chance to hack the other skins to use our "just show non members first page" bits, and the other feeds to just show teasers.

When I get round to it, I'll do a default install that we can use to show off our skins without having to hack them all to do the "only show non-members first page" bits and other stuff. I'll also start coding in the logic for "special posts" that show off the features of any skin etc.

Talking of plugins (and skins), since the beta seems to be imminent (lol, where have I heard that before?), should we hold off on releasing any skins/plugins until it's released? Otherwise we need to code for 1.6 alpha and 1.# beta as these will be the public releases that people will be using.

If we decide to release and code for 1.6 alpha then we won't be able to release certain plugins, Dannys weather plugin and our code plugin are examples of ones who's minimum requirements are higher than 1.6 alpha.

Anyway, as always, let me know what all y'all think ;)

¥

First off, just to help Danny get up to speed, Super Blog is an attempt to get a blog to be a forum without any core hacks.

Right, now you know as much as we do here's my thoughts :-

We need a way of differentiating between forum blog(s) and normal blogs, so far I'm going along the lines of :-

• Each forum = seperate blog
• Stubfile = superblog.php (or whatever)
• tagline = forum name
• long desc = form description
• full name = forum group
• Shortname = "forum"

My thinking is - if we use seperate blogs for each forum, then we can assign group permissions (in bo) which enables us to have "anybody", "members only", "staff only" etc, which is a major forum feature. I'm also considering making all posts protected, which will keep them out of the all blog (which I know we don't use here). If I did this then I'd create a pseudo login for "guests". I thought about using categories for the forums but then we'd have to piss about trying to hack in descriptions and all the permissions stuff.

I still need to work a way to make "posting" easy (ie, from front page with no choice of blog/cat [would be current blog]), and of course we'd need to enable plugins for comments (smilies, bbcode, code etc)

Ideally I'd like to make this a set of plugins, but I think the reality is that it's much easier to make an uber custom skin, but we'll see

Anyway, if either of you have any thoughts on the matter just let me know

¥

Automatic update checker

Ok, this is gonna take a tad of work, but it'll be worth it.

We need to create a db table and admin page for uploading plugins/skins and entering them into the db with a "current version" number. I can code the logic required into our current plugins, it won't actually do anything until I code the update plugin but it means that they'll be "update enabled". We also need to add a file to all of our skins (so that the update checker can "grab" their version and check them as well).

I'm thinking of keeping this plugin as a current members only function.

I'll hammer on with the toolbar coding first though, as that's needed before the code plugin can be released.

Basin skin

First off, great skin Danny :D, validates as strict and the css (although it has a shedload of warnings) validates as well :D

You did have a tad of an error with your black/white code, but if you change it to this it works :-

<div class="bPost<?php if ( isset( $black) and $black ){echo 'Black'; $black = false; } else { $black = true; } ?>" xml:lang="<?php $Item->lang() ?>">

(Damn, that code plugin rocks ;))

One other thing to note, until I convert the comment form to our random fields version it won't work here, so you'll need to use the astonishme one to make comments (not finished nebula skin so comments wont work from their either)

We also need to hack in the custom css/title stuff and do the info icons for this skin (lol, and I bet you thought it was finished huh Danny :p), but that's all custom to here and wont affect the released skin

Then we just need one of you to write a fluffy article to go with the skin

Am toolbar

I'll (hopefully) have this coded up and working on the code plugin by the end of the day, it should be the last of the work required for it. It's mainly a matter of doing all the js logic, but I can steal some of that from the quicktags plugin.

Anyway, I hope you two lazy arses enjoyed sleeping whilst poor old me worked my fingers to the bone :|

Have fun

¥

How about using a mix of hard-coded links and category listing for the sidebar?

Presently, when you go to "Home" you see:

Categories

ALL (Newest->Oldest)
Articles (0)
  Antispam (0)
  CSS (0)
  Web Design (0)
  XHTML (0)
Blubberton (0)
News (1)

Yuck! Seems like visitors should see somthing like what's below, instad.

I'm not quite sure how to do this in b2evo and it's quite different from our own menu system on Randso, as I just have a simple cat/sub-cat thing. We could do that here, using the types (plugins, articles, etc) as the main cat ... but then each main cat would ahve to have the same (and a really long list) of sub-cats (by topic) ... which doesn't seem either efficient or make for a very good list of cats on the sidebar.

Was thinking a FLAT cat structure where the main cat is the type and the topics are "extras", when making a post.

Will that work?

Front Page

I'm not sure what to do here. We have a "home" blog, but really, what is the content going to be. It seems we either need a static front page ... maybe it can be a "home" blog, with a few never-changing articles "about us" type stuff. OR we could go the other way and make it a blog all and have it update anytime we add new content anywhere? Dunno.

Regardless of content, we need to add some pleasing graphics or summat to the page, so it looks a tad nicer and inviting (looks very plain right now).

<?php
echo 'hello world';
echo 'smilies are fun ;) :) :( => :O';
?>

<script type="text/javascript">
window.alert('the [xb] tag in bbcode produces [b]bold[/b] text ;)');
</script>