Hey everybody,

I tried XOOPS a long time ago and wasn't to hot on it, but I've just recently installed 2.0.7 and I must say it's a vast improvement and I'm loving it. It does just about everything I want it to and what it doesn't do can mostly be fixed up with mods. There are a few things that I would still like to see added into the core - so here's my little braindump of ideas.

Note that some of these may have been mentioned in some form or another by other users but I just figured I would list all the ideas I've had while working with the newest version of XOOPS.

Tweaks to current core systems:

- The ability to resend a user's greeting email. Some users on my site registered but either gave the wrong email address or there were errors with their email (full, spam blocking, etc). I set up a little Contact Us form for registration issues so I can reset email accounts (if they've typo'd and provided a new one) and/or changes password so they can login (assuming their broken email now works).

I would much prefer to just reset the email address and click a "Resend Welcome Message" so the user would get to read my welcome message and see their password so they could log in.

What I would like to see even more is the ability for users who haven't received their registration email to be able to click a link similar to "Lost Password" so they could go about fixing their email address / having their greeting email resent automatically. They would click the link, go to the page, fill in their user name and password (which would only work on this page and NOT log them into the site), and go to a page where they could enter their email address again and hit Submit to have the greeting email resent.

- Better Block configuration. I have found configuring blocks to be somewhat difficult and a little lacking on the features side. What I would like to see is the ability to customize each section to have a completely different block layout. For example, on the home page I want the User Menu block on the right, but when I go to the forums page, I want it on the left.

I think it would be semi-easy to set up a system like this. You keep the current layout but when you select a page with "Show blocks visible in ", it lets you configure the block layout for that page. The new layout configuration would be stored in the database like the old, but you would have a row for each section and that row would have the layout data in it.

Also, having a visual layout manager would be nice - it could simply be a small table that showed the basic layout of a page and had the blocks arranged on it. You could change the number in the table and hit save - it would then resort the table and display the new layout. See my poorly made example here: http://mac.halodev.org/xoopsmisc/vblocktoolex.htm - I know, my table skills are laughable, but I think you get the idea.

Another nice feature would be the ability to customize a custom block for a page without having to make a new one. You could use a sectioning system in the block configuration that would have {IF PAGE} and below it would be the custom block text/html/etc and it would end with {END PAGE}. PAGE would be the section name. This would make managing custom blocks much simpler - I rather dislike making 5 custom blocks for ads so each has a different layout.

- More flexible Partner Sites section. Having to manually change the acceptable image sizes and not allowing users to upload their own images are two of the things I can think of that make this part of XOOPS much less flexible than the rest of the package.

I think it would be very nice to be able to set the partner logo size via the administrator panel. Also, when users submit their site to be a partner, it would be nice if they could upload an image upto -x-KB (specified in settings). When they upload their image, it would be nice if it was auto resized to the set dimensions, like WF-Downloads does.

Also, I think setting a locked image size for the tag is something that needs to be togglable, I had to manually remove this as well so logos that weren't exactly the right size didn't get distorted. If using image resizing like described above, it would be possible make the image meet the requirements of the page. There may be some quality loss but at least the aspect ratio will still be intact.

A nice new feature to this block would be sections, where I could put specific partners into specific sections on the Partners page. For example: Developers, Fan Sites, Publishers, etc. It would all still be on one page but it would be sectioned off in new tables.

- Top Story Block or integration with News module. Would love to see a top story block. Right now I use a custom block in the top center of the page for a Top Story, but it's all manual. It would be great to be able to have a default block for a Top Story that would let you set the news id #, if the category image showed in this block, and if you wanted to show the number of reads or not. Also, when creating a new news article, being able to designate it as the Top Story would also be nice.

An alternate approach to this would be to not have this as a block but as part of the news module that you could toggle on or off in the news settings. When this feature was turned on, the Top Story would be at the top and in its own box / table so it could easily be designated from the rest of the news posts. Having "Top Story" above it also wouldn't hurt.

- Ability to better control PMs. Right now, it seems, that my users can send thousands of PMs if they so wished to, I don't see any way to limit them to a KB or # of PMs quota. Also, I've gotten several emails from users asking where in the world they could find messages they've sent out. I took a look around and couldn't find any sort of "Sent Items" box.

- Mail individual users. Sure I can look up a user's email, fire up my email program, and send them a message - but it seems like it would be easy to integrate it in to the "Mail Users" function. I was thinking that there could be an option under groups to select "Individual" and once that option was clicked, a new text box with a "Find User" button would appear.

You could either type in the user name or click the find button to search for a user. When searching it would be nice to be able to use wildcards, but nothing else to make it too complicated or fancy.

- Adding the ability to get a user's last IP. Going through server logs to get a user's IP is very tedious and a total pain. I think it would be nice to have the users IP available to admins when they go to Edit Users -> Username. Just a little space at the bottom for "Last Logged IP: " would work. When ever a user logged in, the database would be updated with their latest IP.

- Links in Who's Online block. This would be a very minor and subtle tweak, but where it said "x users are browsing _section_" it would be nice if _section_ was automatically linked to so that other users could just click there to see what all the fuss was about in that section.

- Visual confirmation feature for new registrations. It would be nice to have a little extra protection in the registration department. Using a visual confirmation system where you have to type in a random set of letters, like many forum software distributions and email sites have, would be ideal. This way no spambots could register tons of accounts.

- More... addition to user info section. In the user info section, it shows 5 News/Forum Posts/Downloads/etc items under each of their respective sections. It would be nice if you could click a "More..." link at the bottom of each section to see all of that users News/Forum Posts/Downloads/etc.

- Update Advanced Search to allow searching by user name as well. This kind of goes hand in hand with the above feature request. When users go to advanced search, it would be nice if they could add "Posted/Submitted by user: " as a parameter.

- Group news. News that only shows to specific groups would be really handy. For example if I wanted to let unregistered users know that I fixed a registration bug, I would only want them to see it as this information is useless to already registered users. Another example would be I have developers and average users, I only want to developers to know about the new CVS server.

I think this tweak would be rather simple as I see some functionality for it in the FAQ addon SmartFAQ.

Modules I'd like to see officially incorporated into XOOPS:

- WF-Downloads to replace MyDownloads
- Liaise to replace Contact Us
- XFsections to replace Sections

I'm sure I had some other ideas to go in this post but over the course of writing this I've forgotten them. They will likely come to me again later while I'm playing around with my site, so I'll be sure to post them then.

Thanks for reading through this long post and I hope I haven't repeated too many ideas that other users have suggested.

Thanks,
Nick

Hey all,

Two more things came to mind over night:

- Ability to add blocks to the bottom of a module's content. Without having to edit the theme's files of course. A good example of how this feature would be used is the following: I have a banner advertisement that I want to go on my forums but I do not want the banner ad at the top of the forums, I instead want it below all forum content.

- Movable comments that may be moved system wide. I've had a good number of people put comments in the wrong news article or wrong content section all together. The ability to move a comment from say, Polls to a certain news item would be invaluable - it saves the admin time and the user time. Also, it would be nice if you could convert comments to a forum post and choose which forum to place them in.

That's all I've got for now, give me some feedback on what you guys think. I don't want to just put up ideas and not see any replies with opinions ;) Tell me what you're thinking about what I'm saying, revision is the key to success.

Thanks,
Nick

reasonable, 2improvement...

...old order that I knewn in this project and which made me migrate from postnuke to xoops, seems to dissolve each day and leave place to chaos... like seasons...

Nothing bad! Let other teams explore other possibilities, its a good thing 2improvement, but contributing cloning mods... well, i'm just confused with all these clones dispersed around, like downloads and faq, one upload, the other do this or that, what to install, xoopsfaq, xThis or Xthat (?)...

if its not time to manage & focus on the improvements that maybe means version 3 will be completely different and the 2 is not anymore significant. while waiting...


self improvement!

Hey again,

Still some more ideas, this time I bring you 5 new, relatively small, tweaks and a more difficult module reconfig.

- Ability to divide the news by days and optionally have next/previous day at the bottom. Currently all the news comes as just one giant lump and it's hard for my users to see what they've missed out on. Being able to set "Show News by Day" would be great, that way all the day's news would be on one page but users could still check old news by going to a previous date.

Having days under the months in the archive would also be useful, it would make finding news items from specific days rather easy. A site with a really good setup that goes above and beyond what I've said here is http://halo.bungie.org/ - their news system is very easy to use.

Another thing you can see at the bottom there is the news titles from previous day's and when you go back a day, it has the previous and next day's news. I think this would be a VERY nice option to have for a new news system. The previous and next day news feature could be put into blocks and list just the news topics as you see on that site.

- Show poll results if a user has already voted. Currently, when users log into the site the poll shows all the poll options even if they voted. I was thinking it would be great to have the results automatically displayed if a user has already voted.

- Update Advanced Search to search by date / date range. The Advanced Search feature currently isn't very "advanced" in the sense that it doesn't have maximum search flexibility. Maybe even adding the ability to search by date or between a date range would be good. That way a user could find items with few keywords that only occurred around a specific time.


- Modules/Blocks listed on new lines an not in a giant lump. In the Group administration section of System Admin, it's hard to pick out specific modules or blocks when they're all stuck together in the way they currently are. Having them in a nice list format would be ideal, it would make things easier to read and find.

- If a block has no name, only show block contents I recently wanted to post up a center block that had no title at the top so I simply didn't enter a title. This did not work out how I planned it, there was still a space for a title above the block and you could see it was "missing" a title. Adding some logic to not show the title part of the block if there is no title seems to be what's needed here.

- Improved sorting for the Block administration page. It would be nice to add some sorting functionality to the column titles so finding specific blocks would be much easier. The columns that would need sorting are: Description, Title, Module, Weight, and Visibility. The others could remain unsortable, those 5 are the only ones that would provide real usefulness when sorted.

Well that covers it for this installment. I'm just wondering if writing these is useless or not. I know people at least click to this page but I haven't seen much feedback as of yet. Do any of the developers actually read these?

Nick-

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Hi Nick,

yes many developers are definately reading here. But there is still something else you can do.

Visit http://dev.xoops.org and have a look at the project list. For every project there are separate bug, patch and feature request trackers. So you might just add some of your suggestions to the feature request tracker for the correct module. A thread in the forum is easy to miss. A tracker item will be noticed in any case.

For example here is the feature request tracker for News:
http://dev.xoops.org/modules/xfmod/tracker/?atid=135&group_id=1008&func=browse

Spell Checker

Spell checker for posts, pm's, etc.

I know feature request, but wanted to add this one, lol

Automatic-search-before-posting-new-topics......

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Now that is a bloody fantastic idea, love it, that would be so cool

Perhaps not impossible... would save the moderators on here a few headaches :)

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I think that is more theme related because I have made themes before that will not include that part if I don't put in a title.