We Want Your Input on Vanilla 1.2

Vanilla 1.2 is going to be a great, significant release. There will be plenty of new features, many of which will be included as new extensions, allowing them to be easily disabled and enabled easily.


Some new features are:

Automatic image width reduction by window size (an upcoming update to HTML Formatter), a feature similar to the one on IP.Board, so that images never create horizontal scrollbars on the page; images will either be too small in width to be sized, or the width will be reduced to the perfect size.

Minification, compression, and a bunch of other speed optimizations (an upcoming extension called Minify) to make the forums load faster for users, especially first-time users.

Whisper notifications (the Whisperfi extension) so that users don't miss whispers

Some will be enabled by default, others won't be. So we want to know, which extensions (if any) do you think add essential functionality to Vanilla 1? There are so many really awesome extensions out there, but we don't want to include most of them, just the ones that add a very commonly used functionality, ones that will be useful for 90% of Vanilla installations.

Tudor

1. Attachments

2. A system of permissions for categories

3. Quoting

4. Comments permalinks

5. Polls

luc

About 1. from @Tudor. I've got a small update of the extension by Jazzman, to add a counter of download. I can provide it so you can enhance it for vanilla 1.2 if you like.

Because it was done when I had absolutely no knowledge of php (not that it had greatly improved since :)).

About extensions for 1.2, I'd say:

Attachments

Quoting

Comments permalinks

Account Pictures

yann

1. Category ordering and permissions.
2. Notification that work.
3. Session in database.
4. Poll.

Dinoboff

We will only include extensions that are stable and maintained, and that follow the best practices. The maintainer will have commit permission.

If an extension you want included needs some love, please fork it and fix it.

pbear

1. Attachments
2. Quoting
3. Polls
4. Calendar/Events (for v1.3? :) )

I always end up adding some kind of custom header via Mark's Lussumo Banner. And PageMgr custom pages (e.g. "About this forum" info I find better in a tab than requiring some perpetual sticky post; Contact gets its own page and form where there's no anonymous posting; etc.). I don't know how essential those are for anyone else.

edit: dang grammar

pbear

Let me add: easy insertion of YouTube/Vimeo/et al. such that you don't need HTML formatting enabled to do it.

hlfcoding

More prepkg'd extensions would be nice. But I would prefer more work being done to finalize and refine the codebase. I would also like pagelist and sqlbuilder components to be more robust, as in ability for sqlbuilder to do nested selects, and for pagelist to be able to exist multiple times on one page. I would also like to see an established method for creating custom root .php pages, and a basic set of base classes to build extensions from, like manager/model classes and controls. The lack of standards with a lot of extensions is really alarming. AJAX support for extensions is also something that would be very beneficial for everyone. These base components are not hard to DIY, but it makes more sense to have a standard set. Most importantly, the documentation in the dokuwiki must expand to cover more than the 30% of Vanilla that it currently covers. I think for Vanilla 1 to keep going these issues must be addressed. Other than that, Vanilla 1 has been a mature product that is mostly very easy to work off of. Speaking of minify, has there been/will there be any solutions for caching the sql results?

SubJunk

Great input guys, thanks for your thoughts. Keep it coming :)

glow

I'm not sure to understand why do you keep improving vanilla 1, when vanilla 2 is (suposed) to come up?

[-Stash-]

Attachments, Inline Images, Quoting, comment permalinking, Category Permissions.

Also, a robust WYSIWYG editor to work well with HTML Formatter - this doesn't exist yet AFAIK.

Does the Minify extension have anything to do with http://code.google.com/p/minify/ ?

SubJunk

@Stash Yes, it is exactly that. There are some very cool improvements coming for Minify as well, the best of which is it will read the CSS/JS files straight from the HTTPd, which gets around the PHP overhead, making the file serving roughly 10x faster

@glow Vanilla 1 and Vanilla 2 are very different, and some people might prefer to continue using Vanilla 1 instead of changing to Vanilla 2. Vanilla 2 isn't a replacement for Vanilla 1, it is just different. They will be developed alongside eachother.

pbear

Inline Images...

++

(goes so naturally with Attachments I forgot to include it :)

jonobr1

These extensions I think should be considered to be packaged, although I'm not sure which of these are stable enough to be considered to be added. Also, some of these have been requested.

• User Fields + Account Pictures
• TagThis
• Page Manager

In addition I think it would be great if users could carry multiple roles. This I think would be able to grant a lot more flexibility, not really sure how it would slam the database though. As opposed to a hierarchy like unauth, member, mod, admin from least power to most power it's more like a bunch of skill sets. More of a symbiosis, which I think helps drive a community.

kaos

Brand new clean style :D

rayk

RSS feeds (feedthis) should be included.

kaos

all links open in new tab/page

Simba Cub

Multiple file uploads

View images inline

Auto resize images

[-Stash-]

I hate when links open in new windows/tabs without me asking. That's what CTRL+click is for...

robertpateii

^^^ yes. standards, please.

SubJunk

@[-Stash-]: Middle-click too :)

[-Stash-]

OT: And in Firefox, don't forget Shift+middle-Click to open a new tab in the background ;)

Even more OT: Aww, my name linking doesn't work anymore :(

SubJunk

That's weird, for me middle-click without shift opens the tab in the background. Maybe I changed a setting and forgot

fmimoso

Remembered one: force the selection of a category when starting a new discussion.

yann

Another request: Mark all comments in given category as read.

fmimoso

I don't agree with this last one: if it isn't read why should we mark it read?
The ideal would be to mark "unread never to be read messages" as "ignored".

[-Stash-]

Or have a "only show unread messages since last visit" user option...

yann

@fmimoso: sure that works for me. It's a feature request for one of the users of my forum that's all.

@Stash: works for me too! It would be the best option to be fair.

Dinoboff

We will add any add-on (including themes ad styles) that is stable (doesn't need major changes) and maintained enough. It can be maintained by someone else than the original author as long as he understand the extension and can test it with the current version of Vanilla 1 in the repository trunk.

So far only Klaus (aka Subjunk) has added some extensions (Notifi, Whisperfi and Sirnot's HtmlFormatter).

yann

@Dinoboff: After noticing major XSS attacks on an addons (TagThis), it would be a good idea to point addon writers to wapati or similar attack checkers. Just my $.02

[-Stash-]

I can't believe I forgot this, but for the love of god, PLEASE include Set List in the Vanilla 1.2 release. If this is in the core then plugin developers will start using it more often and we'll get generally better options for plugins!