The Road to 1.0

Introduction

This is a (wish)list of features and improvements for an upcoming 1.0 version of sf-active. i started that list quite spontanously. My main motivation to start that is my experience in administration of various imc/cms systems during the last years. Take tis list as a sketch of the "ideal" IMC Software.

During the last years, IMCs changed a lot: Some of them have to handle massive data, the admin groups became bigger and more non-tech people became involved into moderating. Furthermore, in the next years i expect that internet use will increase massively, expecially the use of multimedia. To give poeple (especially people who are new to the medium and who are not experienced in handling tons of information, browsing google or reading manuals) free and fair access to all this information will make it necessary to find improved forms of handling such information.

Although techniques such as tagging etc became popular (as in flickr), they are often only understood by people who are experienced in intrenet use.

... to be continued ...

I guess what i actually have in mind is a IMC Software which acts as a news (publishing) sytem, an archive for the "history of the social movements, as a sort of groupware for admins and colloborative tool for the techies. Especially the communication (lets call it workflow) in between admins (and between admins and techies) seems to be important to keep IMC alive.

... to be continued ...

Many IMCs are using verious software to communicate (imc system, wiki, blogs whatever ..) and glue all that together.

... to be continued ...

New Features and "Modules"

License Chooser For Open Publishing

Details: ActiveSfDevelOPLicensing

Article Tagging

http://www.getluky.net/freetag/

Introducing Levels of Admin Accounts

maybe as in Drupal (possibility of granting special rights/use of modules)

Admin Action Logging

see feature request #444 at codecoop

Integration of Help/Documentation Into Admin

to make orientation easier for new Admins and non-tech people

Internal Communication In Admin

integrating a small noticeboard, wiki (or both) for communication inside the admin area.

Background: Mir has a little tool to leave messages, which is very helpful to explain to other admins what you have changed or going to change. This could be expanded maybe to order messages according to issues etc.

Export Function For Articles/Features

export to other imc (mir, dadaimc ) an easy to use way of exporting an artice (including media) and import it on a different imc system such as dada or mir.

export to other file formats

open document format ( http://www.tinybutstrong.com/tbsooo.php ?)

pdf ? (do we want that)

there might be other file formats which could be interesting. i havn't checked export/import formats for systems like drupal etc.

Integrated Mailform for Admin

to send gnupg encrypted mails to other admins/mods from within the admin area (very useful "on the road")

using the new php gnupg libs (to avoid shell usage) http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.gnupg.php

background: this new php library allows encryption of messages without using exec() or shell_exec() commands. the idea is to have a simple mailform to mail encrypted mails from there to other admins (or multiple admins, lists). this could be a great tool if you are "on the street" and do not have access to your public key ring. (i do not know any webmail which does offer that)

Status Info In Admin

showing some basic infos such as

- total number of articles/comments

- size of database, size of mediafiles

- performance of producer (generation time)

Technical Improvements/Coding

Cleaning up deprecated files, classes etc

PHP5 Compatibility

using new oo concept (security) such as declaring public/private/protected methods , objects

details: ActiveSf2PHP5

Documentype Strict?

tranferring htmloutput to doctype strict? checking templates for validation.

Database Abstract Layer

for compatibilty to postgres/(sqlite? for small installs)

"report this article to editors" function

as optional "module" ?

Highlights Newswire And Open Newswire

... for heavy traffic categories ( see codecoop 505 )

as optional "module" ?

Improving Image Resizing

imagemagick ?

Basic Coding Style Guidelines

http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php

http://www.dagbladet.no/development/phpcodingstandard/

Rules for Class, Function and Variable Names, Indent Style

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_style

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_naming_convention

Experimental Stuff

integrating text-to-speech tags according css2

(very experimental) testing peagle as search engine solution for huge imc sites

"Peagle is a Stand-Alone Web-Frontend for the Beagle-Search-Engine with the look and feel from known web search engines." peagle is written in php, so it would integrate into sf-active.

beagle is a search engine (indexing) based on mono plattform. it could become a great tool to index and search massive media repositories.

beagle: http://beaglewiki.org/Main_Page

peagle: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=38289

Developement Process

Forking Dvelopement into Stable and Dev-Branch

the idea:

That means to fix bugs and adding smaller features to the stable branch with its own cvs (so bugs can be fixed by cvs update), while the other brunch is for development, risks to break things and adds untested stuff..

-- StartX - 03 May 2006