PostNuke

Flexible Content Management System

News

Open Question to Developers

Contributed by My comments attached on Oct 23, 2001 - 10:06 PM

Postnuke is becoming widely accepted, not only for those who are pure webmasters but also the development minded among us. As a result of this there are probably more than a few sites that are customising PN to suit thier particular use, even though we know that the product is still in beta mode. This inherently causes problems at upgrade time. But I must admit with my own site, alot of the changes are cosmetic.




Q1) Has the team ever considered making the visual side of PN a template based system?




This would allow users to customise the look without having to touch code. Take for example the use of [strong]middot[strong] in the sideblocks. I am replacing mine with an image, which I will have to do again on the next upgrade. Even the use of OpenTable() and CloseTable() could be replaced sometimes.




niceguyeddie writes -- Yes, this has been discussed. We currently have a project in the works for theme issues, and the points you raised have also been added as well. Eventually, it would be nice to have every aspect of style and display ripped from the core and added to the themes where they should be.




Q2) What impact is the introduction of the new user system going to have on current modules, including standard PN ones? Is it going to touch every piece of PN?




niceguyeddie writes -- I will give everyone an update on the users system once it is in CVS. Currently, Sean is making it so plugin developers and webmasters have control over the permission system. There are quite a few changes that have to be made, over probably several versions of the .7 Rogue series.




The above are the major ones I had been thinking about. Now for a "lighter" one...




Q3) Private Messages, are these going to be improved? (not considering King Richards recent announcement) The current implemenation is just downright confusing for a non-seasoned web user.




niceguyeddie writes -- KR is working on the PMessages. I only have an idea of the changes, and have not seen a scope on the project




Others...


1. Reviews. Users are able to include an image in their review, however it must reside in modules/Reviews/images... Do you not think this is pretty useless unless the user can supply one?




niceguyeddie writes -- There are several security issues that you open when allowing just anyone to upload anything to your server. You could save it to SQL, but then you open up several performance issues. Besides, reviews are plugins, and for every default plugin I am sure that someone could write something better that would suit their needs more than what is provided.




2. Topics. Why does each topic *have* to have an image? Cannot this be optional and the topic name be made into a link as well?




niceguyeddie writes -- The article system is due for a rewrite in the .8 series. We probably will not be doing any whole sale changes to the topics, articles, etc until that time, unless those changes can be used throughout the system, like the autolinking, etc.




3. MessageBox(). Is this ever going to be moved out into a separate file instead of having to include it inside another file?




niceguyeddie writes -- Good idea, and it has been discussed briefly on the dev list by Seb




Hope I got all of these answered. Kinda felt like an essay test:)





Well that's about it. I am *not* griping about any of these, I am quite happy with PN, it's direction and excellent results so far.
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