Comments on Release preview

  1. 5c.

    I've only just come back from my holiday, so I couldn't get down to that any earlier. I'll just give a short-ish comment on my view on the release schedule/feature list side of things:

    1) Bug fixes and code cleanups are always welcome - in that order. If you can make things better while making life easier for yourself and others, go ahead - it's always worth it. However, I'd try not to leave any obvious enhancements drop before doing a x. release, so if what you want to achieve needs another step in between, I'd opt for a .x release. As soon as you've settled on a final feature set, you might as well go straight for x., but as long as this isn't clear, I'd advice against it: You can't test as thoroughly as necessary as long as your still implementing new stuff...
    2) Some of the things you mention make LnBlog a very modern system indeed - it's worth testing the PingBack/TrackBack feature set and anything that goes with it very thoroughly since you might get ahead of other systems in that respect! But I don't understand half of what this stuff is all about, I'll have to do some reading-up before I can comment more specifically on that....
    3) In order to make working and playing with LnBlog even more worthwhile, the inclusion of the StyleSheet editor seems an obvious step; I like your idea - just don't make it only colours, but also font, list and link styles (something like this: http://www.jsand.net/spinkbb/?lang=en [for PunBB] - I think I've posted the link before; I hope that the output will be considerably cleaner than SpinkBB's, though). Most people bother a lot about the look of things (even if this is not the most important thing if you ask me - I'd rather have things up and working than looking posh while failing miserably...).

    M.

    • Comment posted on Thursday 14 Dec 2006 at 5:34pm
    • By MoonMind

  2. The next release

    Welcome back! Hope you enjoyed your holiday.

    1) The next release will definitely be version 0.8.0. I think I was overcome with a fit of optimism when I suggested jumping to 1.0.0. I want to do some cleanup and polish up the look of things before then. However, all that will take some time.

    2) Thanks, I think it's coming along rather nicely. I'm not exactly on the cutting edge here, though - the TrackBack and Pingback specifications were published in 2002. The up side is that TrackBack and Pingback, like the blogging APIs, are easier to test than the other aspects of the software because they have published specifications that clearly define how they're supposed to work. Plus, thanks to TrackBack spammers, I've already gotten plenty of free testing on receiving TrackBacks. ;)

    3) Just for the record, version 0.8.0 will definitely not have any kind of theme editor yet. I think that will be the big feature addition for version 1.0.0. I want to do some more cleanup and consolidation of the templates and style sheet (you were right - there are *way* too many CSS files) and it's probably better to finish that first. I'll start working more on this after the next release.

    For the editor itself, I was thinking of something vaguely similar to the detailed mode for the PunBB editor you linked to. I probably won't do the whole base color thing (maybe later, but not right away), but there would be sections for various page objects (sidebar, banner, blog entry, etc.) and input controls to enter things like colors, background, font, text size and weight, link style, and whatever else seems applicable. Naturally I'd want to include some JavaScript magic to make it all work nicer. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of options to cover and I'd like to have some way of accounting for variations in the templates between different themes, so it's going to take a while. I'll be posting specific ideas and screenshots as things take shape.

  3. Good way to go

    I agree with everything I read here, including the schedule for feature inclusion, and as always, I'm looking forward to it. I'll have to prepare a LnBlog installation with various blogs and users in Octobre, and I hope to be using 0.8.0 by then. But of course, 0.7.3 is good enough for me (it's the version that convinced me to change to LnBlog for my main site, after all). The moment you finished streamlining the CSS level, I might be tempted to do some templating.

    Sorry about my lack of knowledge about TrackBack and PingBack - I'm an old fashioned Web 1.0 user, not a blogger by origin, I've only just discovered the trade - however, I've not come across many software packages that implement this on a visible level (and I've used/am using some of the big fish applications out there like WordPress and Textpattern).

    Since I'm leaving again by the end of next week and have a considerable amount of work to do, I can't do any thorough testing on the preview - I'll try to get my hands into that after August 20, however...

    • Comment posted on Thursday 14 Dec 2006 at 5:34pm
    • By MoonMind

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