Roadmap Version 1.7

As a follow-up to this, let me give you another example. In my build, new users get assigned their own communities (categories), but can also create their own communities. I've significantly added to the data a category can have. For example, for their communities, users can define an about us (which is put in the right corner), their own .css/style sheets, their own upvote/downvote images, different types of upvotes/downvotes, the requirements for a post to get to their community front page, community flair, how many flags before something is sent to their modqueue, moderator permissions, community-specific javascript calls, etc. If I created separate plugins for each of those functions, there would be a huge increase in database hits all around what is effectively the same category row. But, with the correct joins, you go get the category data once, and then the various functions grab whatever data they need. I significantly modified core (i.e., /libs) files so that all this data would be appropriately available.

 

really nice. I like the idea of members being able to create their own community/category site. This is a bit like the reddit feature where you become the moderator of an area which you can point people directly to.

 

I am making some good progress on version 1.7. As it develops more, this version is almost totally focussed on 1 thing, revamping the code that calls the data, both in its queries and its logic.

When v.1.7 is released you should not see any major changes on the outer shell of the site and your users will not notice any updates, but behind the scenes we will be doing it faster, cleaner and smarter.

I have worked through about half of the code at the moment and it feels like being on a diet, but gaining muscles at the same time. I am separating the database calls to the Models (the muscle) for each table section and calling those from the old Libs files which are slimming down fast. I am reworking some of the page logic in addition to this so that we juggle performance with array memory, file cache and database files a bit better.

My test site is looking sharp on speed and the code is becoming cleaner rather than messier. Always a good sign.

Hopefully, I will have something for people to test soon.

I will start a new thread for RoadMap 1.8 and 1.9 in a week or so. Pagination will probably be in 1.8. I would like to separate Admin and Main plugins so we can more easily control our Plugin Dashboard but maintain flexibility. That may be in 1.8 also. I have a number of new caching calls in 1.7 but they may be further enhanced in 1.8 and 1.9.

I would like to extend the Media page that is in the 1.6.6 version. Maybe that could be in 1.9. I think 1.9 will also look at using Ajax in some places to do work behind the scenes more.

Stand by for testing version 1.7 this time next week maybe

 

I've noticed many updates to plugins recently (thanks!), especially related to templates. I haven't looked very closely at the specific template changes, but the few that I did look at didn't seem to make much use of Bootstrap's grid system. I'm not good with .css (as you know), but wouldn't it make sense to start converting templates to the grid system? Wouldn't that make them look better on all browsers and devices (not to mention easier to maintain as future Bootstrap versions are released)?

 

yes, I agree. I am 100% for use of bootstrap and its grid system. It is a balancing act at the moment between the popular templates that were created by members previously and trying to work in bootstrap to all new themes and templates. Since we didnt have templates for the plugins updated recently, the first step was to extract the html from inside the php code and at least make it available for customising. A second step would be to bootstrap style it as well.

Thanks

 

Makes perfect sense. Thanks.

 

I have also opened up a section in the forums for "Skins", which would allow users to upload an individual template for 1 part of their site rather than designing a whole theme. The intention here was to give people easier access to different html style patterns for their site (which was the object of Hotarus easy drag and drop customisation setup) and also encourage people to participate in Hotaru at a beginners level. I know it can be daunting sometimes starting a whole theme but sometimes all people might need is just 1 small template re styled for their site.

For example, someone could take the Comments Widget template just recently updated inside the plugin folder and style it with bootstrap, then upload that 1 file to the Skins folder. Other users could then take that file and drop it in their default theme folder. Even if there own theme has that customised, Hotaru will find the file in the default theme folder first and use that as the one to display. This is a good way to customise plugins/themes without having to write a lot of code and without having to worry about them being overridden later.

I will write something up about it later. For now I am just preparing some groundwork for getting things moving in between v.1.7 update, a few plugins, stocking the resource section of the forum and setting up a stats area for admins to better monitor their sites traffic and also its performance.

Hoping to finish off 2014 with some good results for Hotaru and lead into 2015 in a positive way

Appreciate everyones comments on the forum board. Sometimes coding helps. Sometimes just sharing ideas and ideologies is enough as well. Thanks

 

Inspired by the good work of @sereban on widget templates

 

I recently came across an article which suggests hackers can embed working Javascript into images. So far, my research to prevent it indicates that setting the header "X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff" works for IE and Chrome, but Firefox, after 6 years of discussing the issue, still hasn't implemented this (although they have a $1000 bounty for the fix). According to this, imeanit=yes does it for Firefox. It's not clear to me yet what will do it for Safari (like Firefox, it appears they're looking into adding this to WebKit), and Opera doesn't seem to have anything that I can find. So this is the way the start of my header.php file now looks:

Code:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8; imeanit=yes');
header('X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff');

Not sure if this will fully prevent the hack, but it might be useful to add something like this to future versions.

 

Pagination with Bootstrap managed to sneak into v.1.7 as I am getting closer to finishing now for release. Still testing a few things on user register and login which are critical to get right.

Can be seen on http://ipadrank.com now

 

cron will be in core for v1.7

 

Big thanks to those currently helping with the testing of v1.7
A few areas to fix up and a couple of items to finish before ready for public beta this coming week

thanks particularly to @sereban and @robin007 for the many installations they have tried out

 

closing this thread as v.1.7 is now out
http://forums.hotarucms.org/resources/hotaru-cms-core.4/