Re: embracing the future

>I know nothing about the phpslash-dev site, but I am quite interested in
>offering what Back-End has learned/used for adding/editing documents.

People should really start trying phpslash-dev module from the cvs. It's 
pretty much "stable" enough right now to be used in replacement of 
phpslash-ft. But, remember that's the "experimentation" module. We should 
probably freeze it as it is right now and do a minor release based on it so 
that people can try it and we can get an idea of how the migration will be 
from -ft (current stable release) to -dev. From then on it will be downhill 
with -dev.
Remember that -dev is fully modularized. Everything, every block, story, 
header behaves in this manner... Great level of "granularity" and also a 
scary thought that if something goes wrong, it might be hard to know from 
where the error is coming... that's why we need testing, to improve it to 
the point that we know for sure we are not missing anything and start 
replacing our own sites (first) with the minor release (fingers crossed) and 
deal with possible pitfalls.

[snip]

>Why not give your users the option of entering/editing stories using the
>editing syntax that they choose?
>
>Back-End has added a wiki text editor mode and an implementation of
>htmlArea3 to psl's present options.  Giving users options is a good
>thing.  Adding an option for phorum-like syntax could be a useful option
>too.  For the wiki text we added an extra column for both the parsed
>html as well as the original wiki content.

I really don't know much about what BackEnd is. I guess I jumped in late in 
the phpslash-* discussions and didn't get the whole scope of it. I keep 
reading your posts relating to it, but I don't know anything about it. 
Besides the backend.php script in phpslash which I use for my syndicated 
news and Mozilla tabs.

[snip]

>htmlArea3 is pretty good..  There's even a spell check module.  The best
>thing is that it works in Mozilla & IE so I can actually test it.

Sounds like htmlArea3 is the way to go then... Giving users choices is 
great, but if we could simplify things and at least choose htmlArea3 to be 
the default and let users turn it off as they get better in using the 
phpslash interface. Powerusers should be able to go to their own profiles 
and turn on or off what they want or don't want. My concern is to make 
things super clear and super simple for those users who don't have the 
notion of how computer programs work -- or web interfaces for that manner. 
Users who simply have not been exposed to those conventions might not find 
certain things too intituitive when they first see it. I think, for 
instance, that php Phorum achieves this instantly. Once you install it and 
use it, you don't have to know how to do anything (i.e. read any manuals or 
help), so, users start instantly interacting with others in the site. As an 
example of this. I setup a Forum using Phorum (redundant sound uh?) here: 
http://foro.latinomixed.com. In my regular site, dealing with news and howto 
articles in general, users rarely register as new users or for the mailing 
list or anything. Whereas within days of activating the forum I got about 27 
users registered (and counting). In my case, my site aims at those who need 
help (non-power users) who are looking for ways to improve their computer 
knowledge. In reality, even power users benefit from having things simpler; 
that's why Linux users buy Mac laptops with MacOS X on them :-D

>I also like the idea of being able to just upload the html of a story
>rather than having to copy/paste it.

That has already been added to phpslash-dev and it works fine. I ported that 
from my own site which was based on phpslash-0.6.x and updated the code so 
that it works with php 4.1  and up -- the reason for this is that I'm using 
the _FILES array to avoid having users specifically changing their php.ini's 
or anything else. It works perfectly for as long as you have file upload on 
in php.ini (of course). Read the comments in 
include/modules/story/Story_base.class of the phpslash-dev cvs module.
NOTE: that makes me wonder if there is a way to use Oxygen to generate 
documentation for php source code the same way that it's used for C++? We 
should have documentation for the developers as well as for regular users... 
just a thought...

>Would be also useful to allow folks to turn on/off modules through the
>web interface rather than through the config.ini.php

Wonderful idea. The problem would be where to put the config.ini.php then so 
that it's writeable by the user that runs the webserver or in the database 
itself. Maybe we should get rid of the file config.ini.php altogether and 
put this whole file in a compressed format into a record in the database... 
gzip compression is done on the fly these days, why not take advantage of 
that. We could even use jp_cache to cache it for X number of minutes... Joe?

>Also, we had talked about an installer in the past for psl/be..
>Wondered if you had a chance to check out Back-End's new installer
>script.  Makes an installation pretty quick.

The script is written in php and runs as a cgi? or is it a Perl script? I 
did a setup.php script for parsing the config-dist.ini.php file so that 
users can edit it in their browsers and save this file to a file in their 
workstations for then uploading that to whatever server they will use... 
long procedure uh? but works.

----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
System Administrator
LatinoMixed.com

[email protected]

"...The Mac does this so smoothly, it feels like an extension of your mind." 
- Paula Speer, MacWorld Magazine 2003-04

Public signature: http://www.latinomixed.com/lems1/public-a.asc

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