escapegoat.org

Here’s a quick report on the latest code developments. As always, the big need we have is for people who can help out with CSS, as the site still needs somebody knowledgeable to make it look better.

Anway, on the weekend we managed to get the following tasks done:

• Set up the London site on a new server.

• Added a configuration directive allowing sites to use their own local stylesheets and images, so now London and Denmark can look different to each other.

• Comment editing for admins is now working, this was a request by Indy DK as they needed to remove some borderline stuff from a comment.

• Multiple event hiding is now working (bug fix), so all repeating events in a series can be hidden with one click. This should help out with calendar spam in a big way.

• Started work on an integrated system for controlling Bittorrent video downloads from within the site. Torrent creation and control functions work, I just need to make a user interface for it – basically the reason for this one is that torrents didn’t seem to stay running properly, so I added a new process to manage them. Currently it doesn’t look like anything (and isn’t fully working) but when it’s done we should be able to turn torrents on and off for different videos right from within the admin interface, and the torrent downloads should be much more stable.

• Added more documentation on the installation page.

• Added more tickets to the wish-list of features so we don’t forget anybody’s ideas when they get contributed – especially the mobile ones.

I am concentrating on making everything work super-solidly before adding lots of new features, so the next moves will be to get an integrated HTML editor fully working within the site (it’s currently half-done), and probably do more server config (especially SSL for publishing). As far as I know, there are no major bugs currently affecting the site (somebody please let me know if I’ve got this wrong!).

The London indymedia collective recently came up with an interesting idea: “self-administration of comments” . The idea is now working on the development site.

To summarize:

1) Non-admin users can hide comments on their own stuff:

The site allows people to register accounts if they want to (anonymous publishing still works like it always did). If you publish an article, event, or video while you’re logged in, and someone comments on it, you are allowed to hide the comments on your own article, event, or video. If anybody can think of a nice way to encourage people to be responsible for hiding crap comments on their own content, in line with the editorial policy, that’d be cool. If it becomes a problem for some reason I can probably think up some way to bar people from administering their own comments on an individual basis.

2) The site now allows users a choice regarding whether to allow comments:

If you take a look at the publish form for an article, you will see that underneath the body text entry there’s a checkbox with the following explanation:

“You have the option of allowing comments. Untick this box to disable comments.”

So, users can now decide whether they want comments on their stuff (it’s ticked by default).

3) There’s a “latest comments” list in admin.

In other comment-related news, the admin system now allows admins to see a list of the latest comments on the site. Clicking a link on the comment allows the admin to go see the comment in context.

Thanks for the suggestions, keep the ideas coming,