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Suggestions for the blog system

Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 10:35 pm
Author: Brainie Location: Canada
Hello,

7o9 told me to write here my suggestions for the blog system. I don't know who manages the website but please, apply these changes :< .

- Put a draft option. So it gets saved and we don't need to save it by ourselves and get confused with all the copy/paste process we need to do.

- Improve the preview option. A preview should be as real as a published version. So I suggest that when we click on "preview" we get on another page that looks exactly as if it was published. Otherwise we have no complete control on the headline of the article. Talking about the preview, there's a huge bug with it. It doesn't show up the back tabs and there are some issues with PHP (I could see the /r, /n, and all this stuff).

- Put some bbcode adapted to gaming system. Let me give you an example: On clanBase we had to put the flag of a country. We also had this (harder to create I guess): [player]1452342, Brainie[/player] (player's ID + player's displayed name). It creates a link to the player's profile. Same thing with teams. I know it's hard to make but please can you at least make it for the flags as we use them very often in our writings?

- Writers should be able to delete/edit comments on their own posts.

That's all I have in mind. If you do apply these suggestions I can garantee you it will help us A LOT in our writings Smile .

Thanks!

Brainie

P.S: People who are not concerned please avoid answering.

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 10:59 pm
Author: Kendle
Hi Brainie

I'm the coder for most of the stuff around here, although the system as a whole comprises a CMS called DragonFly (of which I'm not the author and am loath to modify) + various "modules" (in particular the competition and content systems) which are mine.

* There is a section for saving entries that is hidden from public view (enabling you to create documents at your leisure and then publish them when you're ready), but only certain people can see it. I guess what you're asking for is a system like that but where only your own articles are available. Sounds like a good idea, I'll give it some thought.

* The preview option is rubbish, agreed, really need to scrap that and do something as you suggest, a full page with an option to publish or discard. Could maybe link this to the draft option, with a "save to draft" option as an intermediate step before publishing.

* The bbcode system is part of the CMS and something I don't like to modify, but I have done so in the past (in fact I already have a flag option, not sure why I haven't installed it here). I'll give this some thought as well, it's easy to do but it just means I break compatibility with the core CMS when it comes time to apply patches.

* Not sure what the current thinking is on comments, we've had some issues in the past with people abusing the comment system. I'm not sure I'd agree that an author of an article should be allowed to edit / delete comments made by others on that article (which I think is what you're asking for?). If eya specifically wants this done I'll give it some thought but it could actually be rather complicated to implement, because the comments are handled by a separate module that only knows which page the comments are to be displayed on, it doesn't know anything about the content of the page or the author of it.

Anyway, I'll see what I can do. Smile

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 11:40 pm
Author: eya_allam Location: Slovakia
I think the option to turn off comments in blogs is enough. we're always available to redact comments that insult the author.

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2014 2:40 am
Author: Brainie Location: Canada
- Kendle

* There is a section for saving entries that is hidden from public view (enabling you to create documents at your leisure and then publish them when you're ready), but only certain people can see it. I guess what you're asking for is a system like that but where only your own articles are available. Sounds like a good idea, I'll give it some thought.

Well I was more thinking about a draft option like the one in Wordpress but it would only allow you to see your own drafts and not others'.
- Kendle

* The preview option is rubbish, agreed, really need to scrap that and do something as you suggest, a full page with an option to publish or discard. Could maybe link this to the draft option, with a "save to draft" option as an intermediate step before publishing.

Yes definetely!
- Kendle

* The bbcode system is part of the CMS and something I don't like to modify, but I have done so in the past (in fact I already have a flag option, not sure why I haven't installed it here). I'll give this some thought as well, it's easy to do but it just means I break compatibility with the core CMS when it comes time to apply patches.

Yes please : )
- Kendle

* Not sure what the current thinking is on comments, we've had some issues in the past with people abusing the comment system. I'm not sure I'd agree that an author of an article should be allowed to edit / delete comments made by others on that article (which I think is what you're asking for?). If eya specifically wants this done I'll give it some thought but it could actually be rather complicated to implement, because the comments are handled by a separate module that only knows which page the comments are to be displayed on, it doesn't know anything about the content of the page or the author of it.

Yes I understand why it's not allowed by admins. No problems with that.


Thank you very much!

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Mon Jan 13, 2014 9:24 pm
Author: Kendle
bbcode updates :

Code:
[flag=xx] or [flag]xx[/flag] inserts a flag where "xx" is the 2 letter country code

For example:

Code:
I'm from [flag=en] England.

I'm from England.

Code:
[player=nn]player name[/player] inserts a link to the player's profile, where "nn" is the player's ID number (the bit after "&cid=" in the URL of the player's profile page)

For example:

Code:
This is my player profile page: [player=7403]Kendle[/player]

This is my player profile page: Kendle

Code:
[team=nn]team name[/team] inserts a link to the team's profile, where "nn" is the team's ID number (the bit after "&cid=" in the URL of the team's profile page)

For example:

Code:
This is my team profile page: [team=556]FAT[/team]

This is my team profile page: FAT

You have to provide the player / team name for the text between the tags because the alternative is to look it up from the ID number supplied and that's not really within the scope of bbcode, which is effectively just a pattern matching function which doesn't make calls to the database.

Changes to the content system (blogs, news etc.) coming soon. Smile

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2014 1:09 am
Author: Brainie Location: Canada
Awesome! Thank you very much! Yeah we look forward to these changes! Very Happy

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2014 9:24 am
Author: eya_allam Location: Slovakia
that looks great, thanks Smile

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2014 10:48 am
Author: Kendle
Eya, I also found a bug in the bbcode system that screwed up posts with more than one "img" tag (which as it turned out was responsible for the mess in the awards news post you pointed out). That's been fixed as well.

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2014 11:20 am
Author: Kendle
Content module has also been updated.

Specifically you can now submit an article (whether it be News or a Blog entry or anything else that you're allowed to submit) and save it as a draft rather than a published item. Draft items are not visible to anyone except the author and system admins and there's a new option in the "User Info" box, and the "Members options" menu at the top, where you can view your draft items.

When viewing a draft item you have the option to submit the draft to make it a published item (possibly subject to admin approval depending on permissions for that type of item) or to delete it.

By saving an item as a draft you can view it exactly as it would be displayed as a published item, to check it looks exactly as you want it, before you go ahead and publish it.

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2014 7:53 am
Author: Brainie Location: Canada
Hi Kendle,

So here are some returns and bugs I've found with the system!


I got scared as hell when I saw that my article wasn't published once I hit the publish button. It saves correctly but once I publish it, it disapears. Luckily I had a html backup Razz . Perhaps it's because of the permission system? Then you should prevent the user if the article is put under a review process otherwise it scares the hell of ya Very Happy .

Some suggestions:

- Make the content less large. It's too large and I don't think it's visually great... I know the page is big but it's not attractive when you read a content that is spread on the whole page's width if you see what I mean.

- Is it possible to have a system (or if you could give me a way to do it in html) to place images in the text? I would like to use more images in my text but I can't manage to place them on the right or left side with the text just beside it. The text goes right under it (back tab).

Thank you very much and have a nice day!

Re: Suggestions for the blog system

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2014 10:14 am
Author: Kendle
- Brainie
I got scared as hell when I saw that my article wasn't published once I hit the publish button. It saves correctly but once I publish it, it disapears. Luckily I had a html backup Razz . Perhaps it's because of the permission system? Then you should prevent the user if the article is put under a review process otherwise it scares the hell of ya Very Happy .


Yeah, some categories (probably most) require admin approval before the content goes "live". I guess an author should always be able to see his / her own stuff, even if it's awaiting approval. I'll take care of that.

- Brainie
Make the content less large. It's too large and I don't think it's visually great... I know the page is big but it's not attractive when you read a content that is spread on the whole page's width if you see what I mean.


Content is displayed the way the site theme is designed to display it, which is outside the scope of the content module or any individual section of the website. You should understand there are 2 parts to the CMS, the data / content that's stored in the database, and a "skin" or "theme" that formats the data before presenting it to the visitor. I'm the coder, I deal with the data / content. I'm not a designer, the layout of this site is largely based on a theme that comes with the CMS.

To give you some examples of what the site could look like here are a couple of gaming sites that use the exact same code as this site does, but with different skins:

www.qlimaxx.com/ <-- Portuguese gaming site, mostly COD4
espc.asia/ <-- Chinese gaming site, mostly CS:GO

This site could look like those, except they both have talented designers working for them. We don't. Smile

- Brainie
Is it possible to have a system (or if you could give me a way to do it in html) to place images in the text? I would like to use more images in my text but I can't manage to place them on the right or left side with the text just beside it. The text goes right under it (back tab).


You'd need to use HTML for this, bbcode is a poor tool for layout purposes. The simplest way to align images is to add a CSS style="" attribute to the image tag. For example :-

Code:
text text text text etc.<img src="path/to/image.png" alt="some text" style="float:right" />

Would place the image to the right of the page with text to the left. Change it to style="float:left" to place the image to the left of the text.

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