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  • Michael

    Babble v3 Alpha 6

    By Michael, in General,

    lots of fine tuning has gone on this release private rooms and whispers should be working properly now.
    private rooms and whispers will now (or should) send out a notification if you are "offline" (each time you go to babble/switch a room/send a message, your last "online" time changes for babble, if that offline time is older than 15 minutes, you will be considered to be offline and a notification will be sent.).
    i've also made some style changes, dropped the background coloring, left them just to be all "white", you can still style them if you want, but i am going for a min. theme here.
  • Michael
    alpha 2 to 5 have mostly been PHP fixes and work, little to no work has went on on the front end so the things that were broken in the first alpha, remain broken in this alpha. One of the new front end features i've been wanting to bring to babble for awhile, is instead of fixed heights for everything, i wanted dynamic heights for it. so it will responsd to the view port size (well, it will measure from the top of babble itself to the bottom of the view port, and resize everything to 70% of the height of that area, hopefully avoid scroll bars and what not. the chat message area has a min height of 150px, cause i just know there will be one person out there that be on one of those 3 inch cheap af android smartphones from back in 2011 that has resolution of a calculator  ).
    I've also been getting a huge amount of feedback from the IPS forums, mainly cyboman, who has given me a ton of great ideas on how to improve bots and other features in Babble.  so like always if you have a suggestion, this is the best time to make it  
  • Michael

    Babble Version 3 Alpha 1

    By Michael, in General,

    you can now test out an alpha of babble v3. 
    https://codingjungle.com/babble/
    there will be bugs with it, uploads do not currently work (they will upload but they wont attach to the topic) and a lot of the commands are still out of commission, edit/delete don't work (well they sorta do, but its not a permanent thing yet) .
    whispers and private rooms should work without a hitch.
    oh you should also be able to use markdown along with bbc in the editor error, so give that a go if you know markdown. 
    so if you find anything that i haven't mentioned here, please let me know, as i'm pretty sure i got all the features i wanted to add in, now its just shoring everything up and getting some styling going on to finish it off  
  • Michael

    Babble Version 3 Update

    By Michael, in General,

    I know it might seem like version 3 is a pipe dream, but after a lot of debate, thinking and trying to figure out what i was going to do with it, i've began work on version 3.
    Its gonna be different than what i've previously shown for babble version 3, it will have some elements lifted from it.  but here is a list of some features removed and added into version 3:
    Removed:
    Guest Messaging: this was removed cause the code was a bit buggy and was standing in the way of some features i wanted to add in. guest will be able to view the room, but there wont be any settings to allow them to chat. Rooms: well they're not really gone perse, but they act differently. in 2, they were treated as different entities than each other, in 3, they are treated as "channels'. persistent online list: as some of you know the online list has been a bane to my existence for awhile, i had thoughts of removing it completely cause of the issues, but i did a lot of work on it for 2, and have taken what i've learned to 3. in 3, the user list is pulled directly from who is connected at the time when it was connected, in 2 it was a list i tried to maintain and i think that was the problem, trying to keep the list synced.  entry/exit notifications: this wasn't really popular with folks, got a lot of complaints about them, so i've decided to just remove them. New:
    front interface: i really like how the new interface for babble is turning out, it reminds me a lot of chats like slack/discord in the way it functions. new sounds: there will be new sound files, less annoying and softer than the old sounds. whisper history: will show you a list of everyone you have had a conversation with in the past, with showing you their status. Statuses: change your status, if you go idle, automatically sets to away. new bots: there will be several new bots and the way they are configured. Group Chats  
    there will be more news as i finalize the alpha of 3, here is a short video of some of the new features and what version 3 looks like:
    *note: there isn't the final look, as i have minimal styling atm, as i get all the elements built and changes in the codebase.
  • Michael

    PHP 7 and you

    By Michael, in General,

    I'll be upgrading my apps to use improvements found in php 7. the current versions of my apps will remain php 5.6 compatible. I will tag each app with PHP7 when i release them if they will only function on php7+.
  • Michael
    I thought would be a good time to bring everyone up to speed about the end of life of CJM (CJ Menu) and its Replacement MGM (Menu Groups Manager). in a lot of ways CJM and MGM will be identical, but there are some key differences and changes. the biggest change is in there code design, as some of you know CJM was my first app made with the new IPS 4 framework.  There was simply a lot that wasn't known about the framework and over the last 3 years i have become very familiar with the framework. So my goal with MGM was to redo CJM with what i've learned over the last few years. There are also problems with CJM, and those issue become more apparent to me when 4.1 and then 4.2 was released, its code base was rigid, didn't allow for easy modification. I basically wrote CJM in the fashion of a 3.x app, but in the 4.x's framework. Below i will list things that have been removed, features added and things that have changed from CJM to MGM:
    Removed:
    Featured and Popular : this feature was never fully realized and the fault lies with me. it never worked correctly and no one has ever really reported issues with it, so i took that to mean it wasn't a "popular feature" and have removed it from MGM.
    Parent Duplication: this was a way around the problem with have menu set to click and having the parent menu have a URL. in MGM this has been done a different way (as the opening for click menus is a separated from the clickable part of the menu). so now when on click, the parent menu wont duplicate itself.
    Predefined Groups: MGM doesn't come with any groups predefined, and the styling differences between the locations will be kept to a min. there will be 5 locations you can choose, there is a 6th choice but it has no location on the front end. its just for when you want to make a hook/widget out of the group. 
    Stems/Indication Arrow group settings: stems were a pain to add in and i didn't like the end result all that much cause they didn't function properly with all the show/hide effects, so i've just decided to remove them. same with indication arrow settings, this will be handled in the theme settings. you can select one or not and if one isn't selected the indication arrow wont display. 
    Group select on menu creation: you must be in the group you want to add a menu item too, or it will add it to the group you are in. i changed this as this required a bit of JS voodoo and hackery into how the forms work. so anything that required a bunch of voodoo to work, i removed and this was one thing that required it.
    App Sync: this was a feature that was removed in CJM awhile back, that was added in promenu, but it wont be making a come back for MGM. so if you were wondering if it was coming back, nope. one of the points of this overhaul was to get rid of problematic features, freeing me to focus on the other features and some of the automation in CJM was causing issues.
    Changes:
    attributes box: there will now be a class, style and attributes box on menu creation on the style tab. i changed this cause like the item before this required some php voodoo to work properly, so it was just easier to separate them out into their own inputs. and should help with understanding with using them too.
    app title as menu title: if you select application as your type, you can now choose to use the app title (whatever is set by the frontnavigation extension) or you can override that and create a new menu title from MGM.
    Application Type: this has changed a bit. when i first wrote CJM they only had a very simple menu system in 4.0 that i built from, so i didn't put a lot of thought into it. this changed with the new menu manager in 4.1 and added to mine, but it wasn't enough and there were things that never fully worked with CJM, this has been corrected. instead of selecting an app then a front navigation/sub item/etc, you select the navigation extension itself from a list, and then if there are any configuration options, they will appear and can be configured and MGM will use them.  The application list has also changed, that it shows the extension directly, and it will only show them after being created if they are intended to be used multiple times. Example: you select a forum, save it, and create a new menu, forum will no loner be an option (as in the frontnavigation extension it only meant to be used once), but this happens at a group level. so you can create another forum menu item on another group. 
    Enable/Disable Groups/Menus: you can now disable/enable groups and items, instead of manipulating their permissions.
    Group Permissions: groups now have a permissions matrix for them, so you can set on a group level which groups can see a menu.
    Publishing/Refresh All Caches: CJM would after any changes to a group or a menu item recache everything automatically for you. this was an issue for some people who were building new menus or had a lot of menus/edits going on. so in MGM you have to publish the group before it shows up or the changes appear on the front end. there will be 2 ways to do this, you can do it just for that group or recache everything. a Publish button will appear for the group when a unpublished change has occurred (also the group will have a visual indicator in the menu in the acp if it has unpublished changes). 
    Traditional Menus: like CJM, MGM's menu's will be "mega", but some do not like mega menus. so i introduced "traditional" menus in CJM. however this was on the entire group. with MGM this feature has been moved to the parent Menu items for bars group type. so you can have one menu that way you can have a mix of mega/traditional menus on the same group.
    New Features:
    about the only thing really "new" would be the locations, and that is just a tweak of what was already there. you can assign multiple groups per location now, and what order they appear in, but other than that, MGM and CJM function more or less in the same way. most of the changes have happened at a code level. I'm also doing my best to keep styling to a min. for MGM, that way it can be easily styled for themes. most of the styling that i have already done, is just for stuff that makes it look presentable on the default skin, but its pretty bland compared to even the min. style approach i took with CJM, even to the point i would say "ugly". 
    the other big change, would be the replacing of the default IPS menu. MGM has a setting to attempt the remove of the Default IPS Menu, but it doesn't do it by default now, there will also be no guarantee that it can, this really depends on the theme as some themes have been known to really alter this area, so my hooks might not have any effect and with like CJM, this will not be considered a support issue and will be treated as its own service if you want me to work on it. 
    So hopefully MGM will be a good for the legacy that started out as promenu all those years ago. 
  • Michael
    I've spent the last few weeks thinking long and hard about this, CJ Menu needs a rewrite. it was my first 4 app coming from IPS 3.x. as it was a "learning curve" app, there were a lot of things i was unfamiliar with and was making "work arounds", that could be done differently in the framework or better. as i was looking at the codebase (face palming a lot) i decided that it would be better to start from scratch and create a new app. So Menu Groups Manager was born out of this decision.
    Menu Groups Manager will have a lot of the same features that CJ Menu has (plus new features), it wont be feature parity with it, as some features in cj menu weren't given a lot of thought, i just added them cause i thought they were "cool" or "interesting". so with MGM, the plan is to figure out what features are good, which ones are bad and go from there. It will also address issues that were introduced with me tacking on features over the years with it.
    I will make a more indepth what is being kept/removed and the new features when i begin to finalize them. I am always opened to suggestions, and this would be the perfect time to ask for them :).
    Also a side note, anyone who has purchased CJ Menu, will have an opportunity to get Menu Groups Manager for free for a limited time after Menu Groups Manager is released.
     
  • Michael

    Update

    By Michael, in General,

    As some of you have noticed, i seemed to have either abandoned my apps or just disappeared. fear not, i am still actively developing and around. the reason for radio silence, life. as some of you know i do have a job outside of my development, we took on a new contract there from several local business and were upgrading their systems, so i was quite busy (as i usually work from home, but this last several weeks, i was out in the field).
    the other even that happened, like most, i have a laptop and a desktop and i also have roommates. I usually use my laptop thru out the day to do things with and at night, its the domain of my sisters children (for school) and/or my sister (for her work) and i use my desktop. however at the beginning of the year, i purchased a new motherboard and cpu (any one curious it was a ryzen 6 1600) and a new monitor (a samsung 4k tv). well after a few days, my gpu died (gtx 970) and i was forced to go back to my intel cpu/mobo to use it's onboard gpu (as ryzen doesn't have one) and i was limited to 30hz on my new monitor (and it was causing me headaches) so i was unable to work, till late in the evening (around 9pm) but i that was nearing my bedtime (as i was getting up around 4am for my other job).
    so these two events left me with very limited time to keep up with everything, but i am back now. I am also looking to hire a friend of mine who is familiar with my apps, to help me out in times like this, but i will need to bring him up to speed as things like the babble chat service can be daunting to some one who is unfamiliar with how it operates.
    Over the next few weeks i will be addressing the outstanding issues and reports i have. monday i will be releasing a updated versions of downloads plus to address a few issues that have cropped up in it and to introduce a few new features that have been requested.
     
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