The other day I mentioned a list of the
new features that have been added to the BlogSphere V3 template so far
however I would love to find out what other features you would like to
see in the next version or if there is something in the current version
that your not 100% happy with then let me know and I’ll see what can be
done to improve it.
Leave a comment with your requests and
suggestions and don;t forget to leave your email address incase I need
to clarify anything.
Thanks,
Dec's Dom Blog 
Declan – I’m starting to use this on my Intranet…but I’m a CSS dummy! I would like to see more/all the CSS files listed. It would make the customization easier for people like me.
Thanks
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The CSS system in BlogSphere V3 will be totally different from what you see in the V2.x.If you have a CSS development program like TopStyle then you will be able to import and export the CSS from BlogSphere V3 to your development application and back again as BlogSphere V3 will not be using seperate fields for each type of CSS style.There will also be a number of example CSS files included in the template so you can find a style you like and start from there.
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Hey Dec – is “mail to blog” going to be there?
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Yep. It’s on the todo list and I think I’ll start woking on it right now
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Hi Declan,
will the photoalbums still be there and if so, will there be any enhancements?
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Declan, you still going to use the BlogSphere wiki for help? It would be great to have more integrated help – especially when a feature is less obvious e.g. referrer settings or ping-o-matic. Basically make it really easy for a newbie to configure.Was also wondering if the size of the FCK editor on the web could be configurable – the default I find to be a bit small so I changed it – but it would have been nice not to have required a design change.And I guess your playing with the new UI styles – like the new interface Scott
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Yes the photo albums will still be there. Are there any enhancements that you would like to see?
My plan it to setup a new wiki for the documentation. Every view and form within the template will have it’s own page on the wiki and there will be a help link from each view/form to that wiki page.
I have not started the web admin module yet but I’ll take note of your request. The next 2.x release ( 2.5.7 ) already contains a config option to change the size of the FCK Editor. You can expect a 2.x release within the next week.
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Hey Dec, these designs are looking awesome!!! Well done and looking forward to kicking V3’s tyres when its released! 🙂
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Hey Dec,Looks great so far. I’m particularly glad to see the direction you’re going with the configurations.Something else that’s been on my wish list for a while is better logging of who is reading what. Now, its entirely possible that some of this functionality already exists and I just don’t realize it, but here it is anyway:- Tracking Hits – the referrers are a start, but they only show where a hit came from, not the page that was actually hit. The page read counter helps a bit, but it would be much more helpful to be able to see *from within a story document* where all it’s hits came from.- WhoIs Lookups – what would be *really* cool is the ability to have some agent do a whois lookup on each hit record and capture information about location (country if not city/country), and organization. You could then build views showing the regional breakdown of hits
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Dec,
Site looks beautiful. VERY well done sir!
I’ll email you later this eve with some code you can use or toss. Some updates I’ve added to BlogSphere in my own blog or others include:
– Whois link in comment notification
– a button from the Notes interface to click to display high-level counts of page views and unique visitors …just 2 numbers …one enters the date/time for start and end of range and then the referrers are scanned to pull the numbers
– Ability from comments screen to enter the number of a comment about which one is replying ….then the new comment includes a link to the earlier comment
There might be one or two others …anyway, I’ll go through my notes and email you.
Cheers!
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Registration?If there were a facility built in to Blogsphere that would allow readers to register with the site thus gaining access to material otherwise locked away from unregistered users, I would likely find a use for it.Yes, I know there are examples of such code all over the place (one on notes.net comes to mind). If I really wanted that feature badly enough I could stuff it onto my server myself (which sadly happens to be down at the moment). But if it were integrated into Blogsphere it would be a step closer to a complete turnkey solution.
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Hey, Declan.First, heartfelt thanks for the extensive work you have done on BlogSphere — I was looking something on the Domino platform to track an upcoming trip to India, wandered into OpenNTF again, and found your project. Up and running, a little quirky like most projects that aren’t run by or like an army, but fun. Good stuff.I didn’t know the FCKeditor existed, and have worked it into a community website I am in the process of developing ({ Link } it’s a great great plus, allows my multiple non-geek editors to get some content out there in a readable form. Seem to have a little trouble with my CSS file overriding it, have to figure that one out still.In the process of hacking around, I think I have developed an elegant solution for FCKeditor integration, including multiple fields per doc. That latter would be nice for web-editing blog stories — I’d love to have that “Read on” field available in the web client as well. I will shoot you a screenshot offline if you are interested. This architecture includes a toolbar selector in the user’s personal profile — which could easily be shifted to the document itself or dropped into a global config for the DB — as well as the ability to change the size of the edit field on the fly, and to have the entire body of the editor increase as the rows of toolbar increase (otherwise, the toolbar size eats into your text area).Another suggestion, which has arisen in this blog or at OpenNTF perhaps, is opening up the config docs to web access. I now have 7.0.2 on a stick, and will likely use that as I am able… but the flat web entry to make basic changes to blog config would be great — certainly all the more because some of the heavy doc processing which takes place after a config change would happen server-side instead of over the wire.THAT would mean a pretty major change in your agents, of course. Let me know if you want a hand, I might have a few free lines to code… On the other hand — and just to throw it out there — it seems there might be an overall architecture question here: I have always found there is SOME way to make global variables truly global, instead of requiring a write to individual documents. Sounds like a -lot- has happened in v3, maybe a complete rearchitecture, so the point may be moot. And you may be close to release, too…I have developed a fairly simple user reg system which plugs users into a standard secondary NAB. App-specific fields are written into the doc, but are invisible unless read through a local registration form in the app itself. The process needs a little work to make it more scalable and probably more robust, but at present it is working, allows immediate sever access, and could contain some of these user values Jason refers to (email address, editor preferences, etc).All the best for v3. Can’t wait to test it.
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Here’s a more succinct suggestion 🙂 – change the landscape of the web story form by taking the category and technorati tag selection off-page: jscript into a form with all possible tags, and feed them into your text boxes on window close. Those list boxes will be getting mighty cumbersome as they grow!
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I want an “Insert…” button. The choices are “Link to Story” and “Image”. For the “Link to Story” choice, it should bring up a dialog that allows me to select an article from a list of previous stories, and it will create the hotspot. There should be a checkbox for “Open link in new window” that controls the target attribute of the link. The result is inserted as HTML or rich text at the current cursor position in the story.For the “Image” option, it should let me choose one from the list of existing images, and it should insert the appropriate HTML or rich text at the current cursor position in the story. Better yet, but a lot to ask for, would be the ability to also choose an image directly from the file system and have the code create the image doc and the link in one step!
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Hi Declan,
a remark and a wish:
the remark:
when i try to open the latest version off the template, it tells me it has local access protection
the wish:
it would be nice if (sub)albums, just like stories, would have a draft and published state. That would enable me to subtitle the pictures before releasing an album.
regards
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I have just disabled the local access protection. You should have no problems now.
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I am sure that this is a dumb question, as I am still on an early release, but is there a method of blocking trackback spam? Also, and again this is coming from a laggard, will I be able to block IP Addresses from the Stories and Comments views?I am actually kind of glad that I haven’t upgraded. This new version is looking really, really good.
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