It would be really nice if the blog name could be displayed for the posts in the All Blogs view. It is confusing the way it is now; the titles are like "Notes from meeting", but there is no way to tell what blog or project it is referring to.
Category: "Tasks"
The new 1.9.3 upgrade zip is waiting on your desktop. A cursory look suggests that there may not be any files in it in which we've made changes, but each one will have to be checked manually for customizations in our install tree, before we overwrite them.
A list of the three most useful bookmarklets would be handy in the sidebar (perhaps below the "Actions" section. The links would provide direct access to each of the handy-dandy reports:
What have I done today
List my outstanding tasks
List my overdue tasks
As of now, the CSS updates to the front- and back- ends are pretty much finished. The few things that I wanted to adjust are too painful to deal with (they'd need PHP hacked to accommodate minuscule aesthetic goals) so I'll leave them to the following task.
The Task:
Respond to CSS bug reports for the two parts of the blog (front end and back end).
Follow up information. Thank you for creating the blog. I will post the initial announcement below.
The opening description:Welcome to our research collective!
In the fall of 2006 we set out to develop a network of people from the Faculty of Humanities who are using or are interested in using CMC (Computer Mediated Communication). At the moment, we are about a dozen people representing six departments and the HCMC sharing experience and research on creating new learning environments and communities.
We use this blog for announcements and discussions. We also like to extend the invitation to new members to join us!
The Netlink IDs: "Claire Carlin" ccarlin@uvic.ca, "Catherine Caws" ccaws@uvic.ca "MC Desforges" desforge@uvic.ca "Scott Gerrity" sgerrity@uvic.ca "Suzanne Gessner" gessner@uvic.ca "Li-Shih Huang" lshuang@uvic.ca "John Lutz" jlutz@uvic.ca "Mathy Ritchiie" mritchie@uvic.ca "Julia Rochtchina" rjulia@uvic.ca "Ulf Schuetze" ulfs@uvic.ca "Ray Siemens"‚ siemens@uvic.ca "Karen Tang" Karent@uvic.ca "Gerlinde Weimer-Stuckmann" gweimer@uvic.ca Helga Thorson: Email: helgathorson@gmail.com
The Announcements:
1. Next meeting: Wednesday, Feb 28th, 2007 at 6:30 p.m. at Martin's Pub/Place (3838 Cadboro Bay: in the little village down the hill) We have booked the upstairs room.
Checking the blogs from the new URL (hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/) everything seems to be working fine. I did notice that there's a very minor display issue with the titles. When a blog doesn't have a subtitle (such as the All blog), the title bar is narrower, causing the search box to hand down outside the bar. I've rather cheekily assigned this as a task to Greg to fix, since he's the CSS guru for the blogs.
I would like to open a blog for the upcoming Humanities Project Showcase. I am treating the showcase like a project, and think that there will be sufficient posts to warrant its own stream. Announcements will originate from here, and I may welcome faculty to participate in discussion items. Most of the faculty involved are tech savvy already (to one extent or another), and they may actually use it. Also, Ali, Greg and Ehsan will be involved in the Showcase, and having them participate here will introduce them to the blogging tool, too.
Completed Feb 7: Using the report URLs and bookmarklets to manage my work, I notice that although it's handy to see the full list of my outstanding tasks, it's not as useful as it might be because they're not sorted by their deadline date; in other words, it's not easy to see which are most urgent. This ought to be an option in the drop-down on the HCMC Stats page.
Also, "HCMC Stats" should actually be "HCMC Reports"; although you can use that functionality to generate stats, it's primarily a report-generating tool.
Trackbacks and pingbacks are a pain, and we don't need/want/use them. Turn them off.
The place(s) to edit this and other defaults:
/inc/CONTROL/collections/blogs.php (lines 165-178)
/inc/MODEL/collections/_blog.funcs.php (lines 51-73)
NOTE: I'm going to work on this as part of the deployment of 1.9.2 rather than in the current version. If anyone wants to take this task and complete it on 1.8, go right ahead.
NOTE: I believe this is now done.
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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Auto-P is a bad thing generally, because it leads to posts which are badly formatted inside the db. Uninstalling it would mean such posts which already exist don't display properly, and novice users might enjoy having it there, but it would be best to have it turned off by default so we all basically get used to using p tags and other proper XHTML formatting. Figure out how to turn it off by default.
Spent some time investigating the best way to make canned reports available; the current system allows any report to be bookmarked, so, for example, you can generate a report for "my outstanding tasks" then return to it any time to see a current view of that data. It would be helpful if the report page could also spit itself out as RSS so you could subscribe to a feed version of any report. This is medium-term. Should take three or four hours (depending on how many RSS feed formats we want to support).
I spent a little time playing with the system and thinking about the reports, and it seems to me that we need to include in each report item (ie blog posting) a link back to the original posting. I'm already using the reporting interface to find stuff in previous posts, so being able to jump back to it will be handy.
Other than that, I think we have a system we can work with for a few months, till we're used to it, and then we can revisit it and perhaps do some more customization.
In the process of working on the report backend, I discovered some problems with the language settings. Users can choose to post in various languages, according to the locale they choose, and then their posts will be stored in that charset. When any page combines posts from different locales, some characters will be garbled. This needs to be fixed, but the nature of the system is such that it can't be fixed without re-working the entire language system of B2Evo. This requires substantial research ahead of time. Discussed this at length with Greg.
We need a page which provides a form-based interface where the user can select from variables (user, project, categories, etc.), press a button, and get a detailed report. This involves figuring out how the EZSQL-based code in B2Evo talks to the DB, and how to implement a control plugin properly.
Add a TimeWasted button to the quicktags. Completed 20/11/06.
Create these three blogs and assign appropriate permissions. Completed 20/11/06.
Posts which are designated as tasks can have priority, assignees, task status, and deadline. In the Task status drop-down, though, only "none" is available. We need a suitable set of values there.
Update:
We've set up three status levels: outstanding, completed and abandoned.