Sphene Community Tools

Lately i had a bit less time for SCT so development and response in the forum has slowed down a bit. But since reports are increasing about problems with setup and especially URL lookups, I plan to get a new release out ASAP, since it has been a while since SCT 0.5 was released and there are already a couple of fixes in the trunk which should get out.

So here is my plan:

• 0.6 - As soon as in 2 weeks: should contain all bugfixes and features in the current trunk (obviously) - the only thing left to do is stabilize everything (especially the new ability to have the groupName in the URL instead of the hostname. - it should be compatible with the latest django trunk and django 1.1 beta release (if there is a difference) - if people would test it against 1.0.2 - even better :)
  
• 0.9 - In 3-4 months: The most important thing for me right now is the WYSIWYG editor for the wiki and forum with features like image resizing, including of attachments, etc. It should also contain further stabilizing, cleanup (no dependency between the wiki and the forum) as well as easier installation and integration. (I still have to think about a way to convert an existing forum/wiki to a WYSIWYG forum/wiki - any ideas? :) )
  
• 1.0 - Once the featureset of 0.9 has been proven to work, i will bump it to 1.0
  

In addition to this, the documentation has to be improved and adopted for the latest version.

Please let me know what you think about this plan, what your current problems are when using SCT, and if you would be willing to contribute time and code. Either testing, writing documentation or providing code patches would significantly help me obviously :)
(Even providing feedback helps to motivate me to invest more time into SCT)

If you would be interested to help, but don't know how just leave a comment or write me an email.

--- Last Edited by Herbert Poul at 2009-07-16 09:11:05 ---

Hello,

we already made a few customizations to the sphene code, and we planned a few others soon enough. We want to add private messages and IP tracking, but I don't know how much effort will be required, so I don't want to block your release plan waiting for them.

I didn't provide the already available patches yet because they depend on the current wysiwyg editor, and the situation seems quite dynamic on that front. But it's probably better to describe it.

I added a better support for smileys: namely we can customize the mapping string -> filename (for our board we adopted the free icons from the tango project, which look very nice). Customizing such mapping touches a few areas of the program:

- the mapping in the python bbcode -> html converter
- the wysiwyg toolbar
- the html -> bbcode javascript regexps

The problem is that customization is currently not performed using the database, but using a script: it works fine enough for me, having file system access to my machine, but is probably not acceptable: I think customization should be done from the admin and the mapping should be stored in a database. This would work perfectly on Python side, but the customized map should be passed (in different forms) to the javascript. Currently the javascript is contained in static files, and this is a good thing for deployment.

So what would you do? Serving a dynamic javascript or generating the javascript via a script? I would consider the static js a priority, but I can't figure out an idiot-proof way to replace the static files.

Another feature we already have in place is the board messages icon. But that too would require mappings, new icons etc. (no js luckily), so I want understand first how to solve the above issue.

At this point interesting things seems about to happen: will Sphene keep using the currently available small wysiwyg editor, nice and lightweight as it is, or adopt a more affirmed editor such as FCKeditor/TinyMCE? I feel the scenario quite tangled :)

Those are my current concerns about some interesting things we wrote and which I'd like to contribute back. Apart from these doubts, I'll be glad to contribute any feature/bugfix we will write.

Cheers!

P.S. Neither dropping the bbcode nor completely rely on a wysiwyg editor seem a good idea to me. I think the underlying language for the board/wiki should be a markup and people should be free to edit it either using wysiwyg editor or a regular textarea. My use for Sphene is to convert an existing SMF forum where people is already used to BBcode: for me, I prefer a perfectly working BBcode to a markup yet to be written (and hardly hand-writable as an xhtml-based one would be)