Work on this blogging tool

This task arises out of Martin's task here. Once we have 1.8.7 running, we'll need to examine carefully how difficult it would be to move to 1.9.2. Greg will need to diff the 1.9.2 distro against a copy of our 1.8.7 to see how significant the changes are, and also look at the db structure to see if anything has been modified there.

Completed week of Feb 5; detailed upgrade plan created and trialled with Greg.

Two new versions of B2Evolution have been released: 1.8.7 (which is the end of the 1.8 trunk), and 1.9.2 (which is the new stable version). This presents us with a problem:

We should upgrade at least to 1.8.7, since there are a couple of security fixes in that upgrade. I've manually added a couple as they were reported, but there are probably more. There is a useful patch file containing only the changed files, so I can fairly easily -- painstakingly -- do a diff with WinMerge, and where we have customizations in a file that's been updated, I can either port their changes into our file or vice versa. Given that there are no db changes in this update, I estimate that this would take three or four hours.

However, I think we should also consider moving to 1.9.2. I can't find any documentation yet on whether the db has changed in 1.9.2; if it has, then the task will be fairly difficult, and might take a couple of days. There is no patch for moving 1.8.5 to 1.9.2.

The initial task is for Martin to do the 1.8.7 update. Then we'll add a second task, asking Greg to diff a copy of our 1.8.7 version against 1.9.2, to see if it's practical to migrate.

Posting minutes spent doing initial research on this.

When you are in a blog and click the Categories | All link, a set of posts for a range of dates is displayed, by default from the most recent to 10 days ago (settable in blog properties). When you click the Archive | month/year link for the blog, you get all of the posts for that month on one page. This is somewhat confusing, since "All" implies you will get all posts for all categories. There is nothing on the page to indicate that what you are actually seeing is only the last N days' posts, and there is no "Next page" link to let you see earlier posts.

The requested feature is a paging facility that would display the first N posts, then provide the common [Next page | Previous page | 1 2 3 4 5...10] style of paging control, which would not only indicate that there are more posts but would let the user see them, page by page.

When a post receives comments and the comments are replied to in a comment and the replies are replied to, it gets difficult to follow the thread of the exchange. It would be useful to have a "thread view" that would display a post followed by all of its comments in ascending chronological order, something like:

This is post 1
This is post 1 text.

   This is comment 1
   This is comment 1 text.

   This is comment 2
   This is comment 2 text.

This is post 2
This is post 2 text.

   This is comment 1
   This is comment 1 text.

   This is comment 2
   This is comment 2 text.

The comments could be in hidden <div> tags that are shown when the user clicks a "Reveal comments" button or link.

Background: There are times when several people participate in an activity. One person might blog the details but everyone needs to log the time they spent on the activity separately. What we've been doing is individually writing a "Me too!" post with a link to the detailed description of the activity and the time we spent on it.

Feature request: add a "Me too!" link at the bottom of each post (perhaps only the ones categorized as "Activity log"?) alongside the permalink. When clicked it starts a new post to the current blog with a canned subject line (Me too!) and a bit of canned text like "I participated in this activity". It may also be of minor convenience to insert the same number of minutes as the original post.

When displaying the "Aggregation of all HCMC blogs" view, there is no indication of which blog the post came from. This often makes it difficult to determine what the post is referring to. The originating blog name should appear in the post heading, before "Categories".

Code snippets added to posts is problematic. b2evo requires that you use escapes for < and >. If you don't, you get this:
Parser error: not well-formed (invalid token)

A useful feature to add would be an "escape those pesky brackets" button.
Priority set to high due to the quantity of code we like to add to posts.

1. BUG: Formatting of the comments display is messed up on the "Post details" page (i.e. when you click on the comments link at the bottom of a post) - probably a CSS problem. Comments are run together, making them hard to read. Need some whitespace (it's pretty cheap these days).
2. BUG: Even if a user does not have permissions to post to a blog, the "Post to this blog" link is available. However, clicking it just displays the usual post page, and if the user has permission to post to any blog, the first of such blogs becomes the one being posted to. It is not obvious this is happening, so it is easy to post to the wrong blog. Either the "Post to this blog" link should be disabled if the user can't post, or there should be a message warning of the situation.
3. I find the "Auto line break" thing in creating comments annoying, as it defaults to ON. Would be nice if there could be an option to turn it off by default.
4. It would be convenient if the person who is responsible for moderating comments on a blog could post comments without having to moderate them. For example, if I post a comment in the Scraps blog in reply to an earlier comment, I get an email saying I need to moderate my own comment; I can't just publish the comment in the first place, as I can with posts.
5. The date displayed at the top of a post is potentially ambiguous because of its format (dd/mm/yy). It would be better if it used a non-ambiguous format, like yyyy/mm/dd, or even better "January 7, 2007" or "7 Jan 2007".

Looks like the deadline_from and deadline_to settings aren't having the expected effect. Urgent to fix this.

This task's deadline has been pushed into March because it's not worth doing until we have assessed whether we are to move to B2Evo 1.9.2. There's no point in doing a customization, then having to port it to a new system; best to undertake it on the new system if and when it's running.

In some blogs, we want outsider comments (e.g. the IMT blog, where users have posted bug reports). On others, we want to limit comments to logged-in users. This is not possible with B2Evo. There is a documented hack here showing how to limit all comments to logged-in users; in order to extend this to make it configurable per blog, we'd need to create a new boolean db field in the blogs table, add to the admin GUI a checkbox for turning it on and off, and extend the hack code to check for both login and/or this boolean before allowing a post. Not urgent, but very desirable.