Typo progress

Posted by Scott Laird Sun, 04 Sep 2005 13:43:29 GMT

We've been making pretty good progress towards the next major release of Typo. Here's a short list of what's went in so far:

  • Tags
  • File uploads
  • Gravatars
  • Filter plugins, including:
    • Easy flickr image linking
    • Syntax highlighting
    • Sparklines
    • Auto-generating Amazon affiliate links
  • Comment previews
  • More powerful themes
  • Atom 1.0 support
  • Per-category and per-tag RSS and Atom feeds

There are still quite a few features left on our wishlist; some of those will make it into the next release, some won't. I'm starting to feel like we've passed the halfway point on this release cycle, but we don't have any firm plans for the next Typo release yet. Still, if there's anything that people really want to see in the next major Typo release, now would be a great time to speak up.

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More Typo wishlist items

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 09 Aug 2005 20:54:25 GMT

I updated my Typo to-do list this morning and uploaded it to the Typo wiki.

Hopefully we can get most of those features into the next major Typo release.

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Typo to-do list

Posted by Scott Laird Sun, 10 Jul 2005 21:43:57 GMT

I’m basically finished with my last block of changes to Typo, and most of them have been merged upstream. At this point, I have most of the features that I care about, but there are still a few things left to do:

  • Implement the rest of the Movable Type API, including the DB fields behind all of the useful stuff. Basically, everything that’s available in common blog editors should be available in Typo.
  • Optionally link article keywords to Technorati tags.
  • Look into turning filters and sidebar items into plugins, where all that’s needed to add them is to drop their files into a directory and then enabling/disabling/reordering them from the admin pages. (sidebars are done: #157)
  • Add a Flickr text-formating plugin that will let me say something like [[flickr:scottlaird/24727421 "Some guy on a bicycle"]] and have that turned into a clickable image (with size tags) and a caption. I’m not sure what the right syntax will be for this–I know what Markdown uses, so I can avoid running into it, but I’m not all that familiar with Textile. It might be worth looking at Unicode-only brackets, like «» or 「」. Of course, adding untypable brackets sort of cuts down on the utility of shortcuts like this.
  • Add an Amazon text-formatting plugin that allows amazon:<ASIN> URLs and transforms them into links, optionally with affiliate ID attached. This is a lot less complex the the Flickr filter, because it can just search for <a href="amazon:...">.
  • Add a better way of mapping stacks of text-formatting filters to names. The Admin UI and the MT API both want symbolic names for filters; right now, this is hard-coded. It’d be nice to make this dynamically managed, but it looks like a total pain.

Done

These used to be up above, but they’re done now.

  • Link to author’s email address if provided. (done, #156)
  • Add GeoURL support, with a tag in the headers for it and a config option for providing your latitude and longitude. (done, #154)
  • Add Flickr config parameters so adding Flickr doesn’t require editing the source. (done, #155)
  • Fix the Flickr sidebar so it doesn’t do weird things with portrait images–as it is, the border around the images fits landscape images perfectly but leaves a big gap with portrait images. Alternately, just use the square layout that flickr likes. (done, I’m using square images)

Update: Pretty much everything here is complete as of August 26th. See the Typo Wishlist wiki page for details on where we’re going from here.

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Typo, part 2

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 30 Jun 2005 06:14:12 GMT

I’ve spent most of the evening playing with Typo, and I believe I’ve fixed all of the problems that I was seeing this morning. Most of the problems that I saw were caused by the import script; adding a bunch of ORDER BY clauses suddenly made it import items in the same order that they were originally created.

At this point, I’m nearly ready to make it live. I just have three issues left:

  1. Typo doesn’t ask for email addresses for comments, even though there’s a spot in the DB for them. I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to respond to people when the can provide me with an email address, even if it’s never published.

  2. Similarly, there’s no way for it to display *my* email address. This should just be a quick template hack.

  3. Finally, I really dislike Typo’s default date format. Instead of providing an exact date, it says things like “Posted by Scott 672 days ago.” It looks cool for recent entries, but it’s pointless for anything more then a couple weeks old.

That’s pretty much it. Once those are done, I’ll make Typo my primary blog and start turning Movable Type off. If anyone’s interested, they can see my work-in-progress Typo blog, although I don’t guarantee that it’ll always be running.

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