NAME

TODO - possible changes for BSE

DESCRIPTION

This is a simple list of possible changes to BSE.

Some of these I'll do myself.

• add some sort of id to be used to identify articles (rather than numbers) for use in templates. Possibly they could automatically be added as tag names too. So if shop were defined as article 3, then you could do:

    <a href="<:url shop:>"><:shop title:></a>

  to get a shop link instead of:

    <a href="/shop/">The blah blah Shop</a>

  since the first would be more maintainable. This could be useful for other special articles.

• article defaults based on parent article id

• the ability to have the child iterator iterate over the children of a given article, rather than having to embed the article with a special template

  <:iterator begin children parentid:>... <:iterator end children:>

• use a proper config file - this is getting more important

• automated way of updating the links for articles that include $SECURLBASE

• move RSS template out of common (this has some other issues though)

• some way of showing expired/hidden articles in browse mode

• support for other embedable 'image' types such as flash and quicktime.

  Preferably this would be extendable. We need some way to get size information too (entry from the user I suppose, this could also be used to override image sizes.)

• move most of the shop.pl code into modules to make it more accessible from other scripts (especially for custom card payment.) The first steps towards this have been made, see BSE::Util::Shop. The shop.pl code will be modified to use these functions.

• make the shopadmin product list better. The nested catalog display sucks, especially in Netscape. Some possible options:

  • make it act like some tree controls - with expanding and unexpanding subtrees

  • we have a mix of buttons and links, maybe they should all be links

  • sometimes the tree structure isn't clear - either some way of presenting lines making the tree, or some other method, like nested boxes (using tables?) to show the tree structure.

• better handling of title images? the ability to call a generator function or script? (cool use for Imager. :)

• some form of error handling that deals well with IIS' broken handling of STDERR. Sometimes it seems to drop it, sometimes it seems to write it to the web page.

  This is especially a problem for errors in the mail sending code, since these can fail when an invalid address is supplied.

• a central image repository, so images can be shared between articles

• table editor

• change makeIndex.pl to avoid overflowing the fields

• add a test suite (partly done)

• level parameter to add.pl isn't checked for validity

• Java applet WYSIWYG body text editor (adrian)

• have the image cleanup tool cleanup downloads too (adrian)

• Can we display allKids in the sitemap

• Ability to reorder files from browse mode (the files attached to an article)

• Clean up unreferenced files (like imageclean)

• Split the step kids admin off to a separate admin page.