(2016-10-12, 10:49 PM)Ben Cousins Wrote: [ -> ] (2016-10-12, 09:00 PM)Wage Wrote: [ -> ]A plugin that allows you to toggle a forum/subforum on and off. Alerts the user trying to access the off forum a friendly message notifying them of what's happened. With an optional toggle that allows mods and admins to access off forums. Maybe even add the ability to toggle the forum as hidden when off.
Pretty much mimicking the way board closed works but for forums.
Use permissions.
I'm fortunately already aware of that.
(2016-10-13, 06:18 AM)Wage Wrote: [ -> ] (2016-10-12, 10:49 PM)Ben Cousins Wrote: [ -> ] (2016-10-12, 09:00 PM)Wage Wrote: [ -> ]A plugin that allows you to toggle a forum/subforum on and off. Alerts the user trying to access the off forum a friendly message notifying them of what's happened. With an optional toggle that allows mods and admins to access off forums. Maybe even add the ability to toggle the forum as hidden when off.
Pretty much mimicking the way board closed works but for forums.
Use permissions.
I'm fortunately already aware of that.
Awesome. I don't see how revoking access via a plugin is any different to using Board Permissions... It would be reinventing the wheel for no benefit and add convolution to your board. Ergo: Don't use plugins to duplicate what you can do in core.
(2016-10-13, 06:22 AM)Ben Cousins Wrote: [ -> ] (2016-10-13, 06:18 AM)Wage Wrote: [ -> ] (2016-10-12, 10:49 PM)Ben Cousins Wrote: [ -> ] (2016-10-12, 09:00 PM)Wage Wrote: [ -> ]A plugin that allows you to toggle a forum/subforum on and off. Alerts the user trying to access the off forum a friendly message notifying them of what's happened. With an optional toggle that allows mods and admins to access off forums. Maybe even add the ability to toggle the forum as hidden when off.
Pretty much mimicking the way board closed works but for forums.
Use permissions.
I'm fortunately already aware of that.
Awesome. I don't see how revoking access via a plugin is any different to using Board Permissions... It would be reinventing the wheel for no benefit and add convolution to your board. Ergo: Don't use plugins to duplicate what you can do in core.
I'd agree if permissions gave accurate error messages instead of the standard error page.
Yeah, but there are ways around that too — you can edit language files, use conditionals, etc. In addition, it sounds pretty niche.
I would just like to see plugins that improve core 1.8 functions that are rough around the edges (e.g. private messages). Those of us actively building on 1.8 might be using it for a long time, so anything that compensates for its deficiencies would be really helpful.
Some challenges you might consider, I'd have a bash myself however I'm not too fond of the plugin hooks since they don't seem particularly standardised.
I mention the following so you know why I haven't just popped these up as finished plugins:
Programmers simulate in their mind how to program based upon standardised structuring. Ideally such simulating suggests that hooks should wrap functions, so a replacement function or functions can be used instead of resorting to core file hacks. The problem is that some of the hooks don't exist in the best places, e.g. in the middle of a function. While that might be good for injecting into that function, it would have been better to just have a hook allowing the duplication through plugin and replacement of the function in it's entirety.
Perhaps there is of course another way (I know there is within class structures) but I don't think all the code has followed that standardisation either.
Anyhow, the plugin ideas themselves:
- "Attention poster this post is over 6 months old".
- It seems to be something that's missed from most forums, some way to point out that someone is posting to an extremely old thread which usually results in people querying why the thread necromancy. With a warning or attention message there is no excuses. It would have to be eye catching and ideally have the capacity to be configured to change the length of time used. (A quick look at doing this suggests pulling the raw datestamp from the database for the post to work with.)
- Subforum opening hours.
- A way to set a subforum to open/close at specific times of day. (I did have a look at doing this myself with the use of an additional task script. The problem was it was fine for one subforum, however if you want to run a bunch of subforums with different time intervals, well it means including the open/close time within each subforum config screen) There is an alternative way using Apache's .htaccess and mod_rewrite but that's more of a work around.
- Incognito from Third-Party Tracking
- This one I got about 85% through making a plugin for (As I actually manually hard-coded this in my own forum). The concept was the plugin creates two additional header and footer templates. The idea is those two templates can then be used to place all the tracking related codes that people often put in websites i.e. Google Analytics etc)
In the UserCP (their profile) the member can decide (via a radio toggle) if they want to allow such extra tracking data or not. This can be limited to usergroup.
(Note: When using Cloudflare however even not having tracking scripts added, Cloudflare adds it's own which might obsolete this unfortunately.)
Statistics plugin with proper graphs etc!
Currently stats page looks really bad
Word Filters Log.
The idea: linking/displaying all content that triggers the built in word filter feature. This would allow admins to pinpoint bad content, users, and
even provide insight to future content that needs to be filtered. The option of sending the offender a warning for his/her post that was filtered would also prove to be useful.
Wordlog filters, Old Post check and Incognito headers seem pretty cool. I'd love to see them made into actual plugins.
AJAX Subscribe — enable users to click to subscribe using their default subscription mechanism without a page refresh. A small change that would make a big UX difference.
If anyone has any thoughts on how I could best accomplish this, let me know
That doesn't sound too difficult, Brad. Give me a chance to look at it and I'll see what I can do.