Wedge

Using sliders like on iOS is confusing?

Are the new features enough to make it usable or does it need more?

Visually, maybe, but the items should be class driven - instead of manually making it <strong> and putting [] around it, make it a span with class active or something - then you can style it the same way (using before/after to put the brackets in should you want to), or style it any other way.

It also gives themers the option of styling it how they like.

So, the news feature has bugged me for a while. So I'm fixing it up.

Firstly, reordering it. While the one-line display is randomised, the newsfader is not randomised, it follows through the order given. So you can reorder it.

Secondly, permissions. Right now news is 'everyone'. I've wanted it to separate out permissions for a while, but I don't think the whole gamut of permissions/groups is needed, so we have everyone, signed-in members, people who can moderate, people who are admins.

Thirdly, changing the UI generally. I don't know why I dislike the UI as much as I do, but it seems like a cop-out to me to have it as a series of textboxes like that, so a simple list of items, with modify buttons - plus a shiny modify button. Which will all go to a nice edit window with the editor component in it too.

I also haven't ruled out having it draw instead from a board or boards yet. Not sure how that's going to work exactly. But in the meantime here's a sneak peek.

Oh, I've been known to make a future dated post setup, it's not actually that hard.

The biggest headache is the UI, and then management thereof; in my case only admins ever needed to make such, and in all cases, there was a central page that listed all the topics and so on.

It could, in certain cases, even do back-dated posts.

I think we need to do something with this, especially now that places are increasingly ditching use of [1] etc.

I was debating trying to use the styling we have for the note/notewarn/notenice classes for it, but then I figured it'd look wrong unless all the numbers were also encapsulated.

In other news, this is still way too small for practical use on a mobile device. Even on an iPad 3 it's too small (mind you, on an iPad 3, not even the full width is used in landscape, even including sidebar), though I won't be opposed to making it bigger just in Wireless.

Thoughts?

You realise I'd already thought of that? ;)

When I said about IPB, I really meant looking at *everything* it does. Their quick search has a dropdown, to be able to select forum/blogs/calendar, as well as that being in their main search, something we can't do.

The whole point of pulling the calendar topics away from main topics is very seriously about performance - adding another query to every topic view to fetch linked events is not cheap however you slice it.

Having dedicated calendar topics would solve that particular little performance hiccup.

Common sense suggests that having a 'calendar board' would be the way to go, except that I'm not convinced it would be particularly intuitive - it would require users putting the board in, setting visibility on it and so on, not to mention having to actually implement some fashion of actually diverting things between custom board types; the way MessageIndex works thus far is fine for what it does but we will need to expand upon that in future, and this would certainly pre-empt it.

The thing is, though, even doing that doesn't really solve the issue related to search, it might actually be an improvement to, instead, have the calendar search as a separate dedicated routine that's integrated from the search (the way IPB does it), which means the experience can be tailored better for the user and allow them to search things that can't be done currently.

The inline parser is primarily for things like thoughts where colours aren't really needed. At least, that was the logic - keeping it lean.