IP.Blog 2.1.0 Development Update

[[R] NuclearGeneral]

You may have noticed that I've updated our blog installation again. This brings many new features sine the last update. This update pretty much wraps up principle coding for new features and although there are a fair few tweaks and bugs to be fixed, we should see a beta release fairly soon.

 

The new feature highlights are:

 

List View Returns

A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs.

There's even a little 'preview the latest entry' icon that shows the entry excerpt in a pop-up so you don't have to leave the page to preview it.

 

http://www.mattmecham.com/skitch/Shades-20091130-160120.png

 

Dynamic Sidebar Block

I've moved some the footer links (Top 10 bloggers, etc) into a dynamic sidebar along with Recent Entries. This makes it easier to locate and saves a bit of space.

 

http://www.mattmecham.com/skitch/Shades-20091201-054054.png

 

RSS Imports

Another long requested feature was to be able to create entries from an RSS feed. This is now a feature. You can control which member groups have access to this as well as limit the number of items imported on each cycle.

 

http://www.mattmecham.com/skitch/Shades-20091201-054145.png

 

Banish Entries

You can now banish entries from the front page to remove any 'clutter' such as 'testing' blogs or other unsuitable content.

 

http://www.mattmecham.com/skitch/Shades-20091130-160200.png

 

ACP Clean-up

I've gone through and cleaned up some of the Admin CP pages to make them a little easier to understand and navigate. I've added explanations to the 'Headers' / 'Dynamic Headers' pages so it's clear what they do.

 

Please have a click around and let us know what you think. We've tried very hard to incorporate a lot of commonly requested features in this release and we'll continue to do so over several subsequent releases.

 

As always, this is late alpha software so please report any bugs into the Blog bug tracker as normal.

 

View the full article at IPS